Assignment #2

Congmin Liang
June 09,2010
Assignment #2

the problem of networking

More people can feel succeed when they at the virtual world, they can play many different kind of character and also they can have different experience when they doing something online. Play different character may let people have different experience, and they also can play a brand new character that they have never been in contact. The real life is means one of the characters that they play, if they don’t want play one of the characters they can stop it, but the real self cannot stop when they want. And also they won’t feel the harsh reality if the real life is one of the character that they play. For example, they will find someone in love as the real couple in real life, and they can let them dream come true that they may not make it happen at reality. That’s why people want to see the monitor and feel their “real life”. But I don’t think the real life is “just one more window” (Para .6). Because the real life cannot replace by other avatar, I don’t think the character that they play has the real feeling that they lives in the reality. I don’t agree with Turkle.

For me, I prefer the Stoll‘s idea. We cannot spend our limited time on the internet staff. Nowadays, people lose their opportunities to contact others face to face; no matter who they want to contact with they usually send E-mails or messages to interaction, and phone calls. I prefer face to face contact between people, rather than networks. How can we keep our relationship with others using network? We just need to send them e-mails and messages, or chat with them online? Most people spend a lot of time online so that they cannot contact their friends and family, as Stoll said in “Isolated by the Interent”, “Hardly anyone’s going to tell a stranger on the phone, ‘Oh, I’ve lost friends because I spend too much time online’” (Para .16 Stoll). I think it is true, if you spend too much time online, you will lose more opportunities to get together with your friends. Maybe someone will say he or she has a lot of friends and he or she contact them online such as send them e-mails and messages, or make a phone call. But have you ever think if you are sick or feel lonely you really want someone to get together with you, but they just talk to you online as you do as usual. What are you feeling at that time? As Stoll puts, “Professor Mary Baker of Stanford reports that while she was expecting, she exchanged five e-mail messages a day with a friends across the country… a woman she’d never met. Yet e-mail pen pals can hardly provide the social support of a nearby friend or family member—if Professor Baker had to rush to the hospital, she could hardly get a ride from her e-mail friends” (Para .43, Stoll). The online friendship may help someone who has some mental illness problems, or shy to communicant with others face to face. More people wanted to use the internet to contact others because they are too shy to face others. As Stoll puts, “In 1978, Dr. Zimbardo found that some 40 percent of undergraduates said, ‘I think of myself as shy.’ By 1988, this number had reached 45 percent. And by 1995, some 50 percent of undergrads saw themselves as shy; some research suggests that 60 percent of the population now suffers from shyness” (Para.19, Stoll). Even though those people are shy to face others the internet can help them to contact with people better than the reality, but it is just work on the shy people and who has mental illness problems. If other people spend too much time, they will confuse the real world and virtual world, and they will lost their opportunity to keep their friendship at the same time.

The internet is stolen our real life, we will lose too much things because of the internet. As the end of “Isolated by the Internet”, Stoll said: “The opportunity cost is our time, and it is taken out of our individual lives and our very real neighborhoods. The time you spend behind the monitor could be spent facing another person across a table or across a tennis court” (Para .47, Stoll). We don’t need to spend too much our limited time on the internet so that we will lose our more important things and people, such as our friends and family.