Newsletter for 6th Creative Cuppa Meet-up

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On the 27th April, Creative Cuppa held its 6th meet-up in 324 KEB (Ken Edwards Building), City Campus, University of Leicester. Many thanks to Amit Chandraker, Bashia, Chih-Jung Fan, Hao Zhang, Li Jun Zhang, Mokhtar Elareshi, Patama Satawedin, Rosidayu Sabran, Sarah Cameron, and Ivy Chen, for their participation. We would also like to express our special gratitude to Dr. Gillian Youngs and Dr. Tracy Simmons for their attendance and active participation. This time, our discussion was focused on the topic of ‘Digital Avatar / Virtual Reality’, and Gillian shared her own initial experience and understanding, how ‘digital avatars’ should be taken as representatives of real ‘us’ in the virtual environment, and why this was important to the future of social transformation in the information age.

Basically the discussion was mainly focused on three aspects of the topic. In the first place, as Gillian introduced, though she’d been working in the virtual environment for over a decade, 3D was still something very fresh to her; and what made it so different from her previous experience was its non-linear mode of communication. To explain it, with the development in 3D technologies, now we could create our own ‘visualized’ identities or ‘digital avatars’ on the web; and these different and visualized ‘avatars’ would help us transact ourselves from our real life experience into a new virtual environment; and this new virtual environment was sometimes referred to as our ‘Second Life’. In contrasting to this, in previous time, such visualized images could only exist in people’s heads, which was believed having, to some extent, limited the interactivity between people and their communication technologies, such as computers and the Internet.

Within the virtual environment, now people could make more effectively use of the new media technologies for various purposes of their real lives, from learning new knowledge to solving real problems. For instance, as Gillian introduced, ‘Media Zoo’, which was a project based in the University of Leicester, could be seen as a very good example to see how educators were using new 3D technologies to ‘enhance the teaching-learning experience’ either for them themselves, or for their students. As Tracy added here, this was because the new multi-media environment would ‘articulate people more critically related to their avatars’, so that it would create some ‘more opportunities’ to improve dynamics in the teaching-learning processes. Certainly, after having being reminded by Li Jun of her question, Gillian also pointed out a big challenge in the development, which was that many people still simply treated the new communication technologies as ‘screen’ rather than the ‘infrastructure’; and this problem would tend to result in a fact that these people were more likely excluded from the benefits of the social transformation.

At last, in order to conceptualize her discussion, Gillian considered the 3D techno-social transformation as a further great push in the process of communication ‘horizontality’, which meant that the originally ‘hierarchical and vertical’ mode of communication of human society was going to be ‘disaggregated’ or flattened out; and such trend of change in the communication mode would probably hasten the emergence of a more effectively democratic and information-led society in the future. Certainly, Gillian wouldn’t refuse to accept the result of such a social transformation as a ‘plural mode’ of system in the end as Jin raised the point; and she added that, this could be the reason why we were going to be living in a more open and also more functionalized society in the future.

Generally the discussion this time was very theoretically based; Gillian’s in-depth perception and analysis has indeed improved our understanding of the new rising social phenomenon of ‘digital avatar/virtual reality’. From the feedbacks of the participants, we're aware that some people would expect more discussion time in the meet-ups; therefore, we decide to organize a strongly discussion-based collaborative event for the next time. The topic will be closely related to our discussion this time; it’s ‘the future of communication’. At the time, Tony O'Tierney would like to share his original thoughts on the new scheme of UK’s National Identity Card; Zhang Lijun would be talking about her initial experience, creating PBwiki networks for organizing team works online; and Chih-jung Fan would have a discussion about ‘Digital TV’, which is of his research interest at the moment. Again, we would like to thank you so much for all your great supports and wonderful contributions to Creative Cuppa. We look forward to seeing you all for the next time!

Video links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7TMQzzFFdQ (Media Zoo)


Best wishes,

Jin Shang
Operating Director
Creative Cuppa Seminar Series
04/05/2009