The Social Effects of Media Violence Tutorial Task

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech Shootings in which 32 people were killed by a lone gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, 21-year old Sydney man, Ryan Lambourn, sparked outrage by creating a game based on the massacre. This week, you’re asked to take a look at the game for yourself, here: http://googumproduce.com/flash/vtech_riaa.swf. How do you respond? Is this game unethical? Also, take a look at the various media responses to Lambourn’s game here: http://googumproduce.com/vtechresponse.php (keep in mind these clips have been collected by Lambourn on one of his web pages). What do these responses say about how the relationship between games and violence is currently portrayed in the mainstream media?

For a little more background on Lambourn’s game and its impact, click here. For tutorials, make sure you’ve at least looked at Lambourn’s game and have thought about your response to it.

Creativity … (well, sort of)

For this week’s tutorials on Creativity you’re asked to use the Dvolver MovieMaker to get your creative juices flowing and produce a little short film using Dvolver’s tools (albeit, rather limited tools at that).  Here’s something I cooked up in about 45 seconds:

I’m sure you can all make something more interesting, so don’t forget to post your efforts either to the WebCT Discussion Board or as a comment here!  I can’t wait to see what you all come up with!

Internet People!

In this week’s tutorials we’ve been talking about how celebrity and self are related, especially in terms of the way celebrity is a much more fluid and attainable idea.  A lot of people have cited YouTube celebrities as examples of ‘celetoids’, but this little video makes that process even more visible as it playfully lists almost one hundred recent internet-facilitated ‘celebrity’ moments.  How many can you recall?

You can download this video for your iPods by clicking here.

‘Know Thyself’ (through online personality tests!)

The tasks for this week’s tutorials on ‘Self’ include two personality tests one more or less serious, one decidedly silly.  The ‘Similar Minds’ test, based on the traits material for this week.  To save you the trouble of typing them, I’ve decided to link to the tests from here and, for your amusement or interest, I’ll post my results.  For the first Similar Minds test, here’s my result:

Global Personality Test Results

Stability (43%) moderately low which suggests you are worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious. Orderliness (66%) moderately high which suggests you are, at times, overly organized, reliable, neat, and hard working at the expense of flexibility, efficiency, spontaneity, and fun. Extraversion (50%) medium which suggests you average somewhere in between being assertive and social and being withdrawn and solitary.

Take Free Global Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

I can’t say that seems overly accurate to me!

The second, far more fun test, is the Sesame Street Personality Test.  Here’s what I got:

You Are Bert

Extremely serious and a little eccentric, people find you loveable – even if you don’t love them! You are usually feeling: Logical – you rarely let your emotions rule you You are famous for: Being smart, a total neat freak, and maybe just a little evil How you life your life: With passion, even if your odd passions (like bottle caps and pigeons) are baffling to others

The Sesame Street Personality Quiz

Let’s just hope you don’t get Snuffleupagous!

Mika Brzezinski Clip for this week’s Tutorials

This week you’re watching a clip from MSNBC where Mika Brzezinksi refused to read a lead story (on Paris Hilton). Here it is…

Don’t forget, if you’d like to have this video in your iPod, then use vixy.net, paste the YouTube URL (http://youtube.com/watch?v=6VdNcCcweL0) and convert it to mp4 (which is the video format iPods use).