Assignment 11--Avatar name Courtney Sittingbull

A few weeks ago I was watching NBC's The Office and one of the characters who had recently broken up with his girlfriend slipped into a depressed state. To help cope with his depression he created an avatar on "Second Life.com" His co-worker also created an account to follow him in the virtual world and discovers he had created "Dwight's Second Second Life", which set up of the rest of the scene in the show. When I read the assignment for this week I got excited because I didn't know that Second Life really existed.

My roommate and I spent a good few hours on the program and we started off having a lot of fun. We made dumb avatar names like Courtney Sittingbull and Rae Eebus. We probably spent the majority of the time making our avatars look like us. It was insane how realistic they would get. You could add love handles, saddlebags, big lips, small ears, long hair, etc. After I made my avatar I began exploring the virtual world. I met a girl named Loula Frog who was from Brazil and spoke very poor English. Every time I asked her a question she would ask me to wait a moment and reply a few minutes later. She began following me wherever I went and kept asking me to be her friend, so I got creeped out and ended up transporting myself to another part of the world. As I wandered around, exploring I had a man approach me. No lie, the guy came up to me and asked: "Excuse me? Can I ask you a question?" I replied with a sure he then went on to ask "Is your father a gardener?" I said no and he said "Then how did you get to become such a beautiful flower?" the only response I could think of was "Are you really hitting on me, as an avatar, in a virtual world?!" He was embarrassed and walked away. I couldn't believe it. Some people make this stuff their true 'second life'. Other people I ran into were friendly and helped my roommate and I figure things out, like how to find each other and be transported together.

By the end of our session, I ended up getting fed up with the game. It served no real purpose and wasn't anything I expected it to be. I thought it would be something similar to the Sims games or along those lines but there wasn't much to do and I became annoyed. I'm sure if you buy a package there is far more things to explore but the basic minimum package did not thrill me. I had paying for video games and I know that sounds dumb, but I don't play them often and every once and awhile I just want to try something out ha ha. Anyway in the end, the greatest part of the whole game was creating myself and that is just sad.

Assignment 10--Turn the [web]page

For this blog, I decided to go with an article that I have heard about but I had not read up on and something that I found appealing. In the last month issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine, there was a brief article on "The Signs of Male Depression: How to spot it". They used Owen Wilson's suicide attempt as the basis and attention of the article, but further explained the truth behind males and depression. They list the common side effects of a male suffering from depression will be when he complains of the physical side effects, like loss of appetite or insomnia. But most of the time will avoid the subject to prevent himself from looking weak. The audience of Cosmopolitan Magazine are young women in America, and that was clearly who the article was directed towards. They used words like "your boyfriend" and "your sex life". The article was short but to the point although it left questions in my mind about statistics of male depression, reasons, precautions, and so on.

I then went online and googled a similar article titled "How to Spot Male Depression". Right from the start it took the same approach as the Cosmo article stating that male depression is hard to spot because males are less likely to express their feelings. The website was different from the article in that it provided numbered steps to help spot male depression. Most of the steps were repetitive to the Cosmo article. Telling you watch for a loss in appetite, sex drive, irritability, and physical complaints. The one major difference between the two articles was the use of hyperlinks on the internet. On the website, certain words like, depression and men were hyperlinked to other websites that used similar information to help their readers better understand what they were reading about. On the right side of the page was a box titled, "Related Material" with different links leading to seperate websites on the same material. Links titled, "about depression", "depression disorders", "pregnancy depression", and "symptoms". I found this useful to help me answer my questions and narrow down a broad topic. Above that were other "How to" articles on depression, like how to treat depression, or how to treat a love one with depression. These helped to narrow down the topic of male depression to the topic of making an effort to help someone with depression.

The fact of the matter is, if I need information whether it be the weather or the current happenings of my local town the first place I look is the internet. The main reason is: convience. It is right there on my laptop as opposed to me going out and buying a newspaper and searching through the pages only to read a page and a half of information I might have already known. If I need further information on the topic at hand I just try a new website and continue searching. Its clear to see that the internet is a huge part of our daily lives and its clearly growing. Who knows? Could the internet lead to the extinction of newspapers?