Tölvumál - 01.10.2012, Síða 27

Tölvumál - 01.10.2012, Síða 27
27 a law or two and it is often very difficult to see the social benefits that activists usually refer to as justification for their actions. When users of a particular web service, be that a website, virtual world or something else, organize protests and/or decide to take actions that they know will get the attention of the company that is running that service. Doing things that the users know causes a high loads on the services, increased volume of messages being sent to the operator of the service via their customer support (or other venues) and even in some cases direct attacks (such as denial of service or hacking). Social media activism – using any of the social media tools (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) to bring attention to or discuss matters that the users believe should be known. However, most of the content on these sites is ‘noise’; people simply describing their day or bringing attention to their hobbies – perhaps an unfair, but accurate description of this would be to compare this to a ‘how was your day’ conversation between yourself and your spouse. These social media sites have garnered the attention they have because of how powerful they are in terms of distributing content to many users. Instead of subscribing to a radical newsletter that you receive via (snail)mail once a week, users can now subscribe via various methods to such newsletters that are delivered instantly and allow for an instant reaction on behalf of the reader if he or she is so inclined. It is necessary to mention the fact that it is not only individuals or organizations that use activism on the Internet. We witnessed large corporations such as Google, Wikimedia Foundation (that runs, amongst other, the Wikipedia.org), Twitter and Mozilla Foundation (the makers of the Firefox browser) altering their websites in order to protest the SOPA and PIPA law proposals [4]. This move was considered by many politicians a hostile action taken by these corporations, which means that in part this piece of activism did at least fulfill the goal of bringing attention to the subject matter. I will not offer any moral judgments about these actions, but when such powerful entities start to move outside the ‘accepted’ (by the politicians) lobbyist position and start to employ methods used by activists, they could easily be described as being too forceful. tHe inteRnet as an instRument FoR CommuniCations There have been claims made that the Arab Spring wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the social media [5]. I will not offer any judgment on that but it is clear that the Internet allows for super- fast communications, organization and coordination. It is clear that activists need to have the flexibility to do those things in a fast and a reliable manner and the Internet offers that in abundance. It also allows for secure communications that can be very difficult to intercept and/or decode – a very important thing if you wish to do something that is illegal. What makes the Internet such a powerful tool? In terms of communications the most powerful characteristic is the ‘redundancy’ of the Internet, meaning that if one path is blocked (or monitored) it is usually relatively easy to simply use another path. The best example of this is the censorship practiced in the People’s Republic of China (The Golden Shield project [6]) and how that is being circumvented by the users on a daily basis. eve online and pRotests Leading up to June 2011 CCP had been designing and developing a full-body avatar addition to EVE Online, where previously players had only seen the spaceship they were flying at any given moment. Furthermore a micro-transaction business model was implemented alongside the full-body avatars, allowing players to buy, for real money, clothes for their characters – a purely cosmetic addition with no ingame advantage. As such, this addition was anticipated even though many from the EVE Online community had doubts about putting resources into adding ‘dollies’ into a spaceship game. Once the expansion, named EVE Online: Incarna, went live peoples’ doubts escalated to hostility. Players took up protests to have CCP change the course they were headed; away from micro-transactions and away from developing fully-body avatars at the expense of the space part of the game. When viewed objectively these concerns were fully justified – EVE Online has always been a subscription based game where the mantra was ‘all or nothing’, either the user had access to all aspects of the game or none of it. Adding micro-transactions, i.e. charging subscribers specifically for cosmetic things, was viewed as a money grabbing move on CCP’s behalf. Secondly, the space part of the game had suffered because the avatar development – less content had been introduced and less iteration on existing systems had been done in the time leading up to EVE Online: Incarna. The protest can be described as being twofold. One was a drastically increased activity on the official EVE forums (from 5000- 8000 posts per day to 20.000 – 28.000 posts per day). The other was protests within the virtual world of EVE where players gathered in large numbers (up to 3000 people at the same location, in several locations) with the intent of overloading the servers running EVE and thus causing inconvenience for the players who were just going about their business and also catching the attention of CCP, as unresponsive servers are bane of online services. Fortunately EVE Online is designed specifically to handle large amounts of players in the same locations so the servers in question did not go offline, but the load was very noticeable. To make a long story short this activism, as it was performed by the EVE players, worked. After a few weeks of pressure CCP saw the error and changed its heading. The commitment to strengthen the game-systems already present in EVE Online and to not develop full-body avatars at the expense of the space part of the game was made. Furthermore, while the micro-transaction system that was introduced with EVE Online: Incarna is still there, all further development was slowed down and any additions to that will be done in a very careful manner. As a conclusion, this story of activism in EVE Online is a very good example of how users can get a company to change its business plan. The actions taken by the users were not done for malicious reasons but because of concerns that the virtual world they love was being altered beyond what they were comfortable with. The methods used, increased communications and intentionally causing load on the servers, could be described as being as benign as activism can be – the intention was to catch the attention of the maker of the virtual world in order to save it, not to try and ruin it. ReFeRenCes [1] Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activism accessed May 14, 2012 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience accessed August 31, 2012 [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA accessed September 3, 2012. [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Effect_of_Social_Media_ on_the_Arab_Spring accessed September 4, 2012. [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield accessed September 4, 2012.

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