11 December 2007

Japanese Nationalism

So the people at Microsoft have made themselves a bit of an enemy of Japan. It turns out that when you register for Xbox live on the 360 and try to register as being from Takashima, it doesn't recognize it as a part of Japan. (Which is impossible now anyway because as far as I know, there isn't much in the ways of Internet on the islet. Currently only a old couple from Korea stay there seasonally, the Kotaku article is a bit off on their facts.)

This is really interesting news being that I've also be recently accepted as a presenter at the Eastern Sociological Society meeting to talk about the islet dispute between Korea and Japan. One of the things that I wanted to talk about is how it's quite surprising how the younger generation are engaging in this controversy. For the most part, the Japanese avoid conflicts and debate to a irritating degree. Hardly anyone ever talks about politics or even keeps themselves tuned in on what's going on. (I remember one time the Vice Principle of the junior highschool I was working for was quite impressed on how much I knew about Japanese/US currency exchange rates. He thought only economist would worry about such things.) But from the flame wars on various message boards and such, it seems that people are quite fired up about this. This isn't something that the Neo-conservatives are pushing either, these are young 20 somethings in Japan that are usually apathetic to being a part of anything in their world. One of the things I'm interested about is why would this incite the Japanese so much? The news story report makes it seem as if it's some attack on the Japanese as a nation to make such a mistake.

07 December 2007

Technology and Art

This is a well done documentary about blogging in Japan. I read only a few Japanese blogs, mostly of my previous students and friends. I would have to agree that there is definitely something distinctly Japanese about the way they blog. This is an example of the subtle differences between cultures can change they way technology is used. Technology and Culture are two parts that constantly influence the other, and for some reason often are pushed apart. As if there are moments in which Technology transcends Culture, or that Culture is an attack on faceless Technology. However, really what we see is that both have always been interrelated.

Take for example, the technology for making potable water. As more and more people lived closer together, there was a higher amount of cross contamination in diseases between different people. So every society had to have a means of having drinkable water. Most European based societies solved this problem by fermentation, producing wines and beers that were free of the major bacterial concerns. From that, an entire set of food productions, holidays, and customs were created around the use of wine and beer. In Asia, water was cleaned through boiling and adding tea. Likewise, entire philosophies, ceremonies, and rituals were based on the idea of tea making.

On the other side, music has greatly influenced the technology produced in which to enhance or expand the range of music ability. Beethoven's playing style broke many of the pianos of this day, and newer means of building pianos were created which influence the modern piano. Changes in how music is recorded follow changes in concept of art elitism, to mass art consumption. Music changed from something the leisure class enjoyed, to something for all to enjoy. So technology was created to aid in this ideal.

06 December 2007

Violent video games and violence

You kind have to know about Firefly, specifically to the revelations about reavers in the movie Serenity to get the picture.

Recently, Fox Business had a story on the link between adulthood violence and violent video games. I usually scoff at anything Fox has to say, but further reading into the research shows more validity than I usually give such thoughts. But after reading a bit more on Dr. Bushman's website, I'm reconsidering my thoughts.



The research is quite sound. Most of it is comprised of 300 different studies, some by himself, some by others to create a long range study of video game activities and adult violence. In one study in particular was quite brilliant. Basically he took several school age children and had them play two types of video games coded as violent and non-violent. After 20 minutes of this, the child is then given a simple competitive task against a fictional child. The winner is then asked to punish the other child by giving them a blast of sound through a set of headphones. The sound is ranked from 1 through 10, and the child is told that anything above 8 would cause hearing damage. It turns out that the group that played violent video games were more likely to use a punishment above 8. A study like this is very costly and difficult, so I have a great deal of respect for it.

One of the major things that Dr. Bushman is concerned about is a generalized concept of why people behave violently. Many of this research studies break the traditional myths of violent behavior. One in particular that interests me is his theory on how violent people are not people with low self-esteem.


Narcissists, says Bushman, believe that they are entitled to admiration and respect and, when they don’t get it, they become aggressive. Bushman blames the self-esteem movement of the past 20 years for producing a generation of people who think the world has been turned upside down when they are not singled out for their “special-ness.”

“Because of the self-esteem movement, you have sports teams where everybody gets a trophy regardless of skill,” says Bushman. “There’s a school in Alabama where they had a mirror with a banner above it that said, ‘You are now looking at the most special person in the world.’ Children in elementary school fill out forms that begin, ‘I am special because …’ and they have ‘All about me’ weeks where they celebrate themselves. The problem is not low self-esteem.”

I find this interesting. (Mostly because it flips modern educational theory on it's head.) One of the things that I try to advocate on the video games controversy is to exert that video games is a medium. Like books, movies, music, theater, dance, and comic, they have no moral value or intellectual importance in it of itself. As the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray said, "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or poorly written. That is all." There are well created games like Final Fantasy VI, Dance Dance Revolution, and PacMan. These games challenged the mind to understand and practice routines outside of their normal world. There are also poorly constructed soulless million dollar corporate projects made merely to produce profit at the expense of the public. (I'd care not to name names here.) Consider this, when you see how things are marketed, are these attempts to communicate human interaction, or are they a selling you the promise of solving all the ills in your life?

03 December 2007

Women love the Wii




Honestly, I didn't even need to add the text here. I'm not saying that girls don't play games. I'm saying is that this depiction of women playing games plays into the same thing as babes in beer commercials. There is nothing progressive going on here in terms of race or gender.

01 December 2007

Ubisoft may sue me over this....




Once again something has gotten the internets in a stir, and Something Awful is in the middle of it. To bring you up to speed, Ubisoft has long been promoting Assassin's Creed with the clever use of Jade Raymond to draw the male gaze to their game. Frankly, you couldn't see anything about Assassin's Creed with out her out in front. It's rather unfair, because the game itself is quite a draw on it's own and they didn't really need to have her tarted around. Also Jade seems to be quite a decent person and doesn't deserve to be treated like eye candy to promote the game. The idea of female role models in the game developer world is good and all, but that wasn't the intention of Ubisoft. It was blatant pandering of a person's looks under the guise of women empowerment.

So on the Something Awful boards, a vulgar comic was made in parody of the way that Ubisoft have been using Jade's looks to sell the game. It was vulgar and insulting, but it's the internet, this sort of thing happens. So Ubisoft decides the best thing to do is to bring legal action against Ubisoft.

My question is who is at blame here? Is Something Awful to blame for being the host site? Is the comic artist to blame for making a comic? Or is Ubisoft to blame for treating their own employee like a piece of meat to sell their game. Sierra never treated Roberta Williams this way, makers of gender conscience games like Leisure Suit Larry.

This "gamer girl" phenomenon is strange. When Morgan Webb was the G4 "gamer girl" people automatically called her a fake. The very concept that women would like games challenged the hegemonic idea of the "true gamer". Surely, girls can't possibly like games, if they do, they only like tetris, or they're doing it only to impress their boyfriend. Somehow it was more believable for girls to like other girls than for them to play through Chrono Trigger or circle-strife. Once the public finally got used to the idea the there are girls that genuinely like playing games, they became a national treasure. If someone "found" a girl that liked playing games, it was like finding buried treasure. The industry was no different, soon things like the "pimping" women out to promote games was on the main stage and not just as a part of "booth babes" at seedy gaming conventions. Women were front and center and filled out the "stereotypical" male fantasies of that perfect gamer girl they want to meet. There is nothing "empowering" about having women paraded like this. It is in fact detracting from the long history involvement that women have always had in the gaming world. This is merely treating women like objects to be desired in a new and underhanded way.

28 November 2007

OLPC: supplimental

It turns out that the OLPC people are under even more attack by the Nigerians.

OLPC



I've been using web based e-mail service all the way back in highschool. I remember my awesome cool Animenation email address "cpnguyen@nervhq.com". But I have to say that Gmail is by far the best one I've every used. I really like it's spam filter. The other day I got some spam from Malaysia saying that I could claim some inheritance from a dying man who had the same family name. I cursed the OLPC project as I cleared out my spam.

The Joy of Tech has this scathing comic on the OLPC project which proves a pretty valid point. Although my girlfriend who did peace corps. in Madagascar can speak more on this subject, I really don't know if free laptops will do much for many poor countries. Even the Nigerians are complaining about the results.

One of the things I find interesting is the nerd mentality that is going on with the OLPC project. It's really the new revolution based on the pretense of how nerds understand the world and how "salvation" is found in technology. The sort of thing that works well in The Diamond Age but in real life isn't nearly as useful. Reducing the logic to a bare model we can see a simple set of assumptions.

10 There is an inequity of wealth in the world.
20 I would like to play a part in changing this.
30 LET having technology = success
40 IF we give technology to the poor THEN the poor become successful
50 LOOP UNTIL world citizens are all equal.

The idea is very seductive. Cheap technology for all, and then a globalized meritocracy will emerge where we are all connected through the internet with a chance to live up to the best of our ability. I think that to think the OLPC is missing some key aspects of why many countries are poor to begin with, and what kind of help do they need the most. Don't get me wrong, I think that in key situations, cheap laptops can be quite important. My family has been sending to Vietnam our old technology for years. I just think that flooding countries with cheap laptops isn't going to do much to help their economy as a whole if that is the goal in mind.

23 November 2007

My brother said I looked like L yesterday...

Sometime earlier this week a student was suspended for making a death note (source: Anime News Network). First off, I would like to say that the kid was behaving poorly. Disregarding the fact that the student was copying death note poorly, students who read "hit lists" aloud have always been suspended or expelled in the past.

I grew up in Richmond, Franklin Military Academy is a military highschool in the eastside. I don't have anything particularly against military schools, some people need that structure and discipline in their lives, it's when people began to glamorize it is when I get mad. The eastside was the type of place parents on the westend warned their kids about. Personally, I find it more of a sad place than a scary place. It's hard to be scared when you know how hard people have it there.

What I find rather upsetting is that the principle tells parents to look at a death note fansite, "to get to know the reference better". The website almost says nothing about the show itself, and is really only an online version of the fictional book. Reading through it a bit, it's like a cross between 4chan and post secret. (excuse me for not linking 4chan, I think you can google it yourself.) A mix of vulgar jokes and venting of immature aggression. Not really an accurate representation of the show, or the show's message. I find it upsetting that the principle would need to focus on this aspect of the student, and not other parts.

We live in a pretty inhospitable world. When the human mind can not stand it, we naturally lash out, unfortunately in violent ways. Right now institutions have little recourse in how to understand the problem. Mostly it comes out in the form of isolated what is perceived as dangerous from the community. Then a ritual of victimization is done to galvanize the community to establish how different they are from the perpetrator. However, I would say that this constant isolation does nothing but segregate out people who are in pain, from those more protected from pain. The idea that these people who do violent acts are merely anomalies in a community becomes the most important thing. There is rarely any attempt to say that these are the unfortunate products of the way we live and treat each other. As long as we keep isolating out those who we deem too dangerous to be a part of society, we'll never be able to look at what it is that influences these dangerous things.

20 November 2007

I'd rather be fighting the man


In a incredibly un-Japanese like fashion, people are protesting the new fingerprinting policy for all foreigners entering Japan. I'm quite excited about this. Although many of the protesters seem to be "gaijin" themselves, I do see a few Japanese protesters.

"It's an expression of Japanese xenophobia. Japan is using this system as a tool to control foreigners. For the past few years, the government has been associating foreigners with things like crime and terrorism," said Sonoko Kawakami, campaign coordinator for Amnesty International Japan

The main reason that I'm excited is that it seems that the recent exposure of the blatant corruption in the Diet has urged the Japanese to finally care about their government. In a way, Shinzo Abe was a good thing for Japan, he finally broke the flood gates of participatory democracy for the Japanese.

To be honest many "first world" countries are adopting similar policies. The issue of globalization will rest heavily on how countries choose to weigh state security and open borders.

19 November 2007

Farming is Fun!

I've been watching the newest releases of the show "Moyashimon" (も やしもん) streaming from Japan. Basically, it is about two boys from the country who go to an agricultural college in Tokyo. Kei is the son of the sake brewery and Tadayasu is the son of a "tane koji" store (種 麹屋). Basically tane koji are the basis of fermentation. So obviously the two families of the boys have had a long standing close relationship. The interesting thing is that Tadayasu has the ability to see microbes. Being that this is Japan, the microbes are represented as merchandisable characters. (I really want to get my own plushy of Aspergillus Oryza from the Fuji TV station) Tadayasu uses his special powers to recognize different microbes in various useful situations and hijinks ensue.

The obvious aspect of this show is the propaganda promotion of the agriculture industry in Japan. One of the lines in episode 4 was basically, "There are 3.5 million farmers in Japan, of that, 2 million are above the age of 65. So ganbatte (try your best?), you are Japan's future." These are lines that cut deep into the general problem of the Japanese agriculture industry. Like Americans, farm life is quickly fading away. Less and less of the younger generation want to be farmers. It's thankless, and ugly work that pays next to nothing. Then again, I grew up in Richmond so I have no real say about life on the farm. I heard a rooster for the first time when I was 22. I do know that there are less and less people living out in the country. All of the villages out in the countryside in Japan are shrinking. So much so that they are merging with neighboring villages just to have enough in taxes and such. The problem is that most of the young people from the age of 16 move to the city to go to highschool and then college. They usually find successful lives in the city and never come back. Very few people choose to come back to their hometown to raise a family, and even less would come back to be a farmer. Japan has been working very hard at making farming an appealing career choice. Tadayasu's powers turn the boring part of agricultural research into a rather exciting magical power. I could see this show appealing to many of the existentially lost youth of Japan living dead end jobs in the city. This would remind them that they could come home and live the "simple life" of a farmer. Never mind the back breaking labor, constant anxiety over the weather, gossiping neighbors and corrupt mayors.