Check out this slide show, “The Avatar as Communication,” by Angela A Thomas (aka: “Anya Ixchel” in SL), a lecturer from the University of Sydney. It speaks to a number of issues that we’ve been talking about in class.

FYI: Howard Reingold’s book, The Virtual Community, has been made accessible online.

These videos are by an IAM professor, Patrick Lichty:

Patrick writes: “In early 2000, I purchased a Casio WQV-1 WristCam watch on a whim, and it has become one fo my favorite tools. It is simultaneously the embodiment of technological determinism and its antithesis, as it was once the ‘next big thing’, and also a device that challenges the idea that digital art is about resolution and verisimilitude (as the WQV-1 is black and white at 100×100 pixels resolution), thus resembling older technologies such as 1980’s style personal computers.” 

Brief Synopsis of 8 Bits or Less (4:47, Q1 2002): “An artist who has become blind (whether physically or ideologically) has resorted to viewing his world throught the prosthetic devices that constitute his sense, like cell phones, and wristcams. The result is a distored landscape that considers Sitationist theory, surveillance culture, identity, and alien abduction.”

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Brief Synopsis of A Wristful of Bits (4:34, Q4 2002, Featuring Holly Hughes): “Our protagonist feels that he has been dependent on prosthetic sight for too long, and any distinction between the real and simulated seem blurred at best. The video contrasts a musing on reality in the digital world with a surreal story about the rise and fall of animatronic animals, and how the world was saved by performance artist Holly Hughes.”

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Utilizing the same example we did in class while in groups, please make sure that you consider the following questions while revising your essay. If you cannot apply each of these questions to your essay, then you will able to identify weak areas within your text.

1) Identify the one-two sentences in your essay that explicitly states your thesis/argument.

2) How do you lead up to this argument/thesis; do you get to your thesis relatively quickly? Is the prose that comes before your thesis absolutely relevant to the understanding of your argument? If not, could you get rid of some or all of it and go directly into your argument?

3) Identify at least three uses of textual evidence within your essay and see if you are very explicitly explaining the relevance of this evidence to your overall argument/thesis.

4) Identify at least three examples that you are using within your essay; how are you using these examples? How does each example support the thesis/argument?

5) Locate your quotes - are you explaining the purpose, relevance and/or ways in which each of those quotes is relevant to your argument or helps support your argument?

6) Do you reiterate your argument/thesis within 1-2 sentences within your conclusion?

7) Does each and every paragraph speak explicitly to your thesis? Does each and every sentence lend support to your thesis?