User:Kendal/notes

The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Page 2

"Can you meet me in Data Earth?" "social continents" "virtual living room"

• Meeting in a virtual world replicating the space in real life.
  

Page 3

"These aren't the idealized pets marketed to people who can't commit to a real animal; they lack the picture-perfect cuteness, and their movements are too awkward. Neither do they look like inhabitants of Data Earth's biomes"

• References to the uncanny valley, the space between reality and fiction. The uncomfortable but delicate balance.
  

Page 6

"design a body that manifests the digients' gestures in a way that people can relate to"

• Hinting to the need to design something that already exists in order to feel relatable.
  

Page 7

"If they look like cartoons, no one will take them seriously. Conversely, if they look too much like real animals, their facial expressions and ability to speak become disconcerting. It's a delicate balancing act"

• Uncanny valley and the need for it to be at least slightly real.
  

Page 10

""Everyone here thinks of the digients as animals," she says. "The thing is, the digients don't behave like any real animal. They've got this non-animal quality to them, so it feels like we're dressing them in circus costumes when we try to make them look like monkeys or pandas."

• Why do we feel the need to base something off of reality when we have the ability to design anything? Is it a way to feel comfortable?
  

Page 24

"The information packet from SaruMech had warned about this; a metal and plastic chassis conducts sound in a way that avatars in Data Earth don't.Jax looks up to face Ana, and she marvels at the sight of him. She knows that he's not really in the body - Jax's code is still being run on the network, and this robot is just a fancy peripheral - but the illusion is perfect. And even after all their interaction in Data Earth, it's thrilling to have Jax stand in front of her and look her in the eye."

• What is the difference between the virtual and the physical? Is it something that requires the senses? The first difference noted were the sounds, textures, and tactile experience.
  

Page 27

'There were many reasons Blue Gamma targeted the virtual realm instead of the real one - lower cost, ease of social networking - but one was the risk of property damage; they couldn't sell a pet that might tear down your actual Venetian blinds or make mayonnaise castles on your actual rug."

• What are the benefits of making something virtual? ease of anonymity? less risk?
  

Page 28

"Surfaces in Data Earth have a lot of visual detail, but no tactile qualities beyond a coefficient of friction; very few players use controllers that convey tactition; so most vendors don't bother implementing texture for their environmental surfaces. Now that the digients can feel surfaces in the real world, they find novelty in the simplest things." "boundaries of the physicality"

• Designing differences in virtual & physical space
  

Page 35 & 40

"Some volunteers have begun maintaining rescue shelters, accepting unwanted digients in hopes of matching them with new owners. These volunteers practice a variety of strategies; some keep the digients running without interruption"

"the shelters essentially become digient warehouses."

"The customer base has stabilized to a small community of hardcore digient owners, and they don't generate enough revenue to keep Blue Gamma afloat. The company will release a no-fee version of the food-dispensing software so those who want to can keep their digients running as long as they like, but otherwise, the customers are on their own."

• Reminds me of when a technology is no longer supported, usually a group of die-hard fans take it upon themselves to keep it running, this often happens with social platforms. The comment about ending up as warehouses echoes the idea that these things remain left, untouched & ultimately abandoned.
  

Page 42

"Cats, dogs, digients, they're all just substitutes for what we're supposed to be caring for."

• One character describes these digital pet as a substitute for the real, and we eventually will return to the real anyway.
  

Page 50

" a couple watch a virtual television"

• Even inside a virtual space, we watch a virtual television???
  

Page 65 & 66

"ANOTHER YEAR PASSES. Currents within the mantle of the marketplace change, and virtual worlds undergo tectonic shifts in response: a new platform called Real Space, implemented using the latest distributed-processing architecture, becomes the hotspot of digital terrain formation. Meanwhile Anywhere and Next Dimension stop expanding at their edges, cooling into a stable configuration. Data Earth has long been a fixture in the universe of virtual worlds, resistant to growth spurts or sharp downturns, but now its topography begins to erode; one by one, its virtual land masses disappear like real islands, vanishing beneath a rising tide of consumer indifference."

"they've created an engine that favors asocial behavior and obsessive personalities."

• An echo of the internet and virtual worlds constantly revolutionising and in turn, render previous iterations obsolete. With innovation, things become overlooked and slowly forgotten.
  

Page 69 + 71

"FROM: Stuart Gust

Last night I played SoH with some people who take a Drayta on their missions, and while he wasn't much fun, he was definitely useful to have around. It made me wonder if it has to be one or the other. Those Sophonce digients aren't any better than ours. Couldn't our digients be both fun and useful?"

"FROM: Stuart Gust Yes, I agree with that completely. All I meant was that our digients might have untapped skills. If there's some kind of job they'd be good at, wouldn't it be cool for them to do that job?"

• People increasingly want to instill purpose and use into things and the fun and playful aspect become less favoured.
  

Page 76

"the incongruity between the digients' eternally cute avatars and their increasing competence."

• Reaffirmation that we only want cute and fun for so long, eventually, we want reality to come back to the forefront.
  

Page 86

"All Data Earth continents will be replaced by identical Real Space versions added to the Real Space universe. They're calling it a merger of two worlds, but it's just a polite way of saying that, after years of upgrades and new versions, Daesan can no longer afford to keep fighting the platform wars."

• Old platforms are pushed out in favour of newer technologies, some become emulated but can never capture what they were in their entirety and original form.
  

Page 88 + 89

"those continents are almost entirely devoid of inhabitants."

"they saw how impoverished the private Data Earth was, choosing to suspend their digients rather than raise them in a ghost town."

"There are dungeons without quests, malls without businesses, stadiums without sporting events; it's the digital equivalent of a post-apocalyptic landscape."

• Slowly shifting into a non-place, a ghost town.
  

Page 90

"the keyboard and screen are a miserable substitute for being there"

• Many people's opinion of virtual worlds over their physical counterparts.
  

Page 99

"the charitably inclined are growing fatigued of hearing about natural endangered species, let alone artificial ones."

"no substitute for a fully populated virtual world."

• Opinions of reusing old spaces over the ease of creating & using new popular ones.
  

Page 118 + 119

"the shortcomings of the technology to become blatant"

"still an impoverished medium for intimacy."

• The ultimate difference between the virtual and the real?
  

Raiders of the Lost Web

"The web, as it appears at any one moment, is a phantasmagoria. It’s not a place in any reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. It is not a library. It is a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness."

It is a snapshot, it is precarious. Can we save the lost?

“The day-in, day-out maintenance [of the site] just stopped happening, and so pretty quickly, some stuff didn’t work,” Vaughan said"

forgotten, abandoned, laid to rest.

" “There are now no passive means of preserving digital information,” said Abby Rumsey, a writer and digital historian. In other words if you want to save something online, you have to decide to save it. Ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended to be a messaging system, not a library. "

Keeping a platform or space alive is an active choice, it requires maintenance, care and dedication.

"Mostly, but not entirely. The Internet Archive has its Wayback Machine, an archive filled with imprints of web pages as they appeared in the past, like digital fossils. It’s the closest thing we have to an online missile silo where folders can gather dust until the right person comes looking for them. “There’s a school of thinking that says if you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all,” said Scott, who began working for the Internet Archive in 2011. “But the thinking is, let’s do what we can.”

The life cycle of most web pages runs its course in a matter of months. In 1997, the average lifespan of a web page was 44 days; in 2003, it was 100 days. Links go bad even faster. A 2008 analysis of links in 2,700 digital resources—the majority of which had no print counterpart—found that about 8 percent of links stopped working after one year. By 2011, when three years had passed, 30 percent of links in the collection were dead."

digital warehouses, and wastelands. Modernisation moves swiftly leaving a trail of attempts and iterations lying in the dust.

"Saving something on the web, just as Kevin Vaughan learned from what happened to his work, means not just preserving websites but maintaining the environments in which they first appeared—the same environments that often fail, even when they’re being actively maintained."

You cannot just place these spaces in new platforms, you have to situate them within the context in which they were created.

"And while the Archive and other entities are saving—quote-unquote saving—these sites, even those will go to new URLs. They won’t be in the same place. You’ll have to search for them... There are success stories. But meanwhile, silently, thousands of useful things are disappearing. "

How do we combat this, how do they not become just another nostalgic throwback? How do we give them purpose and a space to thrive creatively?