1. Week 2: The Internet and Virtual Reality
Signing up for student presentations!
Requirements for Facebook group
Facebook membership
Open a group for your project
Post links, writings, photos and videos on a weekly basis, starting week three
The blog will be evaluated at various points in the semester
What are the essential questions to keep in mind when we start using digital networks like Facebook?

2. Main issues for this semester
The Web allows people to express themselves: How can we understand this transformation?
The Web brings people together, building communities? How can people build ‘virtual’ communities? What are some of the social and psychological strategies? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

3. Main issues …
Anonymity and Identity Play in Cyberspace. Why do people like to change their identities in cyberspace. What are some of the most popular subcultures on the web?
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The Web and Big Business. How is the economic impetus of the Web changing its original mission?

4. Original Mission: Tim Berners-Lee
Q: What did you have in mind when you first developed the Web?
From A Short Personal History of the Web:
The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.

5. Tim Berners-Lee
“There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together.”
Discussion: Discuss this second point with your neighbor? Is the web helping us analyze the way humans play and socialize with each other? And what is it that we have actually learnt?

6. Tim Berners-Lee
Q: What should the lay person be aware of as the Web evolves?
We should all learn to be information smart: to understand when a Web site, or a piece of software, or an Internet Service provider  plan, is giving us biased information. We should learn to distinguish quality information and quality links.  As technology evolves, and machine-understandable information on the Web becomes available, we should be aware of the sudden changes which large-scale machine processing might have on our businesses.

7. Tim Berners-Lee
Q: How could the Web be a more interactive, creative medium?
That is a big question.  I am very happy at the incredible richness of material on the Web, and in the diversity of ways in which it is being used.  There are many parts of the original dream which are not yet implemented.  For example, very few people have an easy, intuitive tool for putting their thoughts into hypertext.  And many of the reasons for, and meaning of, links on the web is lost.  But these can and I think will change.

8. Summary Tim Berners-Lee
World Wide Web is built through collaboration, where sites allow users to modify their content.
Discussion: Did this feature become part of web as we know it? Do we really create web content creatively and collaboratively?

9. Wikipedia
Discuss three items that you would like to post on wikipedia and why. 1 2 3

10. Popular blogs
What are the most popular blogs in Hong Kong? Why? Do they give you significant information? 1. 2. 3.

11. Attention economy
“To triumph on the Web is to have lots of people giving attention to your site, instead of giving to someone else’s.”

12. What are the challenges in trying to capture attention?1 2 3 4 5

13. Philosophy of Virtual Spaces
e.g. Eduardo Kacs 'GFPBunny'
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18. Stefan Matessich
The segment with French performance artist Orlan, whose "struggle against nature" leads her to alter her own body through plastic surgery and silicon implants, provides a visceral example of a basic idea: the tension between nature and artifice, between an untamed environment and a human need for control, leads to a serious crisis in what we mean by the human, the natural, and the artificial.
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19. Mechanical Love

26. Phie Ambo, Mechanical Love
Discussion Questions (=exam questions)
1. What can we learn from the relationship between Frau Korper and her robotic pet, Paro.
2. What are the goals of the Japanese designer Hiroshiro Ishirguro 3. Should scientists program androids and robots with human emotional qualities? Why is this necessary?