my Ph.D dissertation topic

[RATTY...]

The fail already starts at the topic; "we can logically deduce that information technology produces a destructive cyber-culture that cannot be satiated, controlled, nor quarantined."

Can we? you're already generalizing, and I highly doubt you can prove such a horrible theory at all. I don't think any serious university would hire anyone with such a bad thesis to work for them for 2+ years, sitting there and jacking off to 4chan and the internet-heroes-assholes there.

Sorry for being harsh, but it's the truth. Been reading 2 other Ph.D thesises earlier who got accepted (ex-gf nutrition, cousin computer security) and this nowhere close to them in terms of quality, even though it's unfinished.

[Bioture]

I guess the "win" is when you used "fail" as a noun. But I see your point. Better disband my research and panel and tell them to take their grant and stuff it in someone else's chimney. They're obviously interested in the wrong presentation because I don't know what I'm talking about! You can't generalize when theorizing! Madness!

Can't argue with a pro who's read two thesis already. Thanks for the input!

[Xog]

lol

Did you take the time to make that? It has "Forum" "TW" "Magi Koz" and i'm sure a few others in there.. lol

[Bioture]

I think overall, you will be heading into trouble if you overgeneralize too much.

Even in Trench Wars, people aren't all jerks who have zero inhibition. The fact that you can have a thread like this and have intelligent and civilized replies to your topic proves that the internet can be a positive thing.

The fact is, if there is any real shift in communication offered via the internet, it is that we are able to easier enter into a community while living in the big anonymous world. Yes that's right, I'm actually arguing the inverse of what you're saying.

The fact is in the past 100 years as humans have went from living in predominately small towns to large cities, people have been able to live lives which are increasingly anonymous. The larger the city, the more anonymous it is, and the less 'community' there is as well. In the very largest cities you can basically live a life so separate from everyone else that people really are doing whatever they want without anyone finding out. As an example, one only needs to look at Tokyo, where basically any strange hobby one person may have, there are probably 10 stores dedicated to that.

They used to say that with the creation of the suburbs in America, and with car travel making it so that people in the same neighbourhood saw eachother less and less, local clubs were where people came to meet eachother. Stuff like the boy scouts, or for adult men the lodges were highly popular in the 50s and 60s.

With the internet, such clubs are increasingly becoming obsolete, because we're able to form our own virtual communities and share interests. Does this mean that we are increasingly alone? Hardly. Even in Subspace, many of us have met other players from the game (I've met people from all over the world while traveling the world from this game for instance).

Do community standards disappear just because we're anonymous? Hardly. As stated, even in this game we have community standards. And just as in the old paradigm of the small town where everyone knew eachother and knew what was going on, status updates, and internet histories allow those within the community to easily keep tabs on eachother. Online reputation is key. You can choose to act like as much of an ass as you want, but really it doesn't matter because people will just ignore you.

If anything the internet has increased communication because we are no longer constrained by the physical look of someone or how they look. Only the content of their writing, or in Trench Wars of their gameplay ability is what matters. You could have no legs and can't leave your house because of that but people will still listen to you if you have someone interesting to say. I'd say this is actually more enlightened than the past.


Either way, you can argue it both ways. And it is because of that I think that you will find it very hard to write any sort of good thesis to prove the point you have. Better maybe to compare and contrast, or use specific groups or specific examples, rather than overgeneralizing your topic and arguing one side of a multi-sided argument as if the other sides don't exist.

It's interesting that you bring up the movement to large cities, I've never thought of it like that before. But as to your "increasingly alone" argument, you're not the first one to disagree. One of the professors on my panel explicitly goes against this idea, which is fine. I'm arguing that the community that we have, subspace forums, isn't a substitute for real communities. Then we get into the trouble of defining "what is a community?" And more importantly "What is identity?" For example, I know that you, Epi, are part of a spaceship game community. I also know that you're a medical doctor of sorts. You live in Canada. You know that I'm going for a doctorate and that I'm also some kind of internet pervert. Is that community? Do we really know each other?

Community standards are also another topic which I don't know a lot about. At this point, from what I can gather (and unfortunately, generalizations are all that's available at this point) is that these standards are fundamentally different when two people in a conversation are behind an alias. But even when they're not behind an alias, i.e. facebook, the information there still comes from the individual, who can (and again, the assumption is that they do) manipulate that information to come off as someone they truly are only in cyberspace.

I need to modify the thesis a bit to include that yes, we can use cyberspace for good things. Great things, in fact, such as the rapid response from relief communities like Red Cross, etc. Also the facilitating of the exchange of ideas. But the evidence is that we simply cannot moderate our own consumption. For example in 2006, the last time the statistic was taken, the revenue for the online pornographic industry was 97 billion dollars. As a contrast, in 2006 Google posted a revenue of 10 billion, and the entire online advertising industry posted a revenue of about 17 billion dollars. By 2012, the forecast for online gambling revenue is a staggering 155 billion dollars. While it's hard to say that these numbers suggest that we're using the majority of cyberspace for good things, it's even more difficult to weigh the pros and cons of a technology we've already exploited to a point that it simply "exists" and is a reality in our current society.

We're in agreement when it comes to the internet increasing communication. Absolutely. So did the telephone and telegraph. It absolutely increases the amount of communication, the speed of communication, and the quality of communication. When you say enlightened, what do you mean? When you are updated on everyone's statuses, is that enlightenment? How do we measure the quality of information that we receive nowadays? Blogs? Newspapers? Wikipedia? Bill O'Reilly?

[Dealt]

might want to consider somethingawful.com if you havent already.. also this has been said before and I might as well re-affirm - internet isnt a cyber-culture it is a community. Ask all the god freaks why they have turned to the darkside now they have been exposed to the internet, im sure they would argue.

It did warp me but I wouldnt say im cyber cultured just a little more sexually desensitized.

[RATTY...]

I guess the "win" is when you used "fail" as a noun. But I see your point. Better disband my research and panel and tell them to take their grant and stuff it in someone else's chimney. They're obviously interested in the wrong presentation because I don't know what I'm talking about! You can't generalize when theorizing! Madness!

Can't argue with a pro who's read two thesis already. Thanks for the input!

You can't generalize when the theory is obviously flawed and you can't prove it.

I'm gonna look forward to the day you're going to show this to the committee and get rejected. Remember to come back to this thread and read how cocky you were.

[Summa]

I need to modify the thesis a bit to include that yes, we can use cyberspace for good things. Great things, in fact, such as the rapid response from relief communities like Red Cross, etc. Also the facilitating of the exchange of ideas. But the evidence is that we simply cannot moderate our own consumption. For example in 2006, the last time the statistic was taken, the revenue for the online pornographic industry was 97 billion dollars. As a contrast, in 2006 Google posted a revenue of 10 billion, and the entire online advertising industry posted a revenue of about 17 billion dollars. By 2012, the forecast for online gambling revenue is a staggering 155 billion dollars. While it's hard to say that these numbers suggest that we're using the majority of cyberspace for good things, it's even more difficult to weigh the pros and cons of a technology we've already exploited to a point that it simply "exists" and is a reality in our current society.

I can explain this phenomenon quite easily actually. In my media policy reform paper we were faced with the revenue issue and the question of where are the advertising dollars going and why? The answer on the internet is simply put: porn, gambling, and google. When we were in D.C. asking some media experts about why this shift was occurring and thus killing newsrooms, they provided us with a simple answer. There is no way to quantify and examine demographics of online users. In broadcast and print media there is a methodology of how to quantify your readership and tell what their demographics are, you then pitch that to an advertising company and they then give the targeted ads to where their demographic of buyers is. However all we have online right now is unique i.p. hits. There is no way to estimate with any certainty who visits where. Thus advertisement companies in terms of online have simply just given their ads to the highest unique user hits. Since 60% of all internet sites are porn, online poker has the most unique profiles and hits, and google is just about everyone's main search engine and homepage; that is where the ads go.

I would have to say that you thoroughly need to outline what the public interest is in your paper. Because there are many people who believe that the public interest is giving people what they want, and the internet fulfills that for many. They use what capital they have (in the broadest sense of the word) to get what they want, and that fulfills the public interest because it opens up a far greater realm of attaining what a person wants. However, others would argue that the public interest is what the people need. And if you argue that, well then you got a lot of work clarifying why they need your provisions and dealing with claims that it intrudes on people's inherent freedoms, and etc.

Also I don't see where your paper necessarily goes? Are your initial intentions simply to diagnose a problem? Or are you looking to prescribe a solution as well?

As for the claims that ratty is making, I would have to agree on some levels. I mean I see tons of ideas that make a lot of sense, but they are vague. And by vague I mean, you don't have a smoking gun. I have yet to see anything so far that says to me "A NECESSARILY causes B, and B is NECESSARILY destructive". I mean you could cite the link between people who sit in front of screens and obesity, but you still wander on the line of free will and people chose to sit there and visit those sites, so is it really the internet's fault or is the blame on the people?

this is probably jumbled...sorry i am having a stressful day

[Galleleo]

Haha, Ratty acting like he knows shit again, he's like Paradise number two, probably lectured to fives of people about Ph.D dissertations.

[PH]

itt we're bad people for using the internet

let's all atone for our wrongdoings by converting to amish

[Epinephrine]

It's interesting that you bring up the movement to large cities, I've never thought of it like that before. But as to your "increasingly alone" argument, you're not the first one to disagree. One of the professors on my panel explicitly goes against this idea, which is fine. I'm arguing that the community that we have, subspace forums, isn't a substitute for real communities. Then we get into the trouble of defining "what is a community?" And more importantly "What is identity?" For example, I know that you, Epi, are part of a spaceship game community. I also know that you're a medical doctor of sorts. You live in Canada. You know that I'm going for a doctorate and that I'm also some kind of internet pervert. Is that community? Do we really know each other?

I don't really see the difference. People at work know absolutely nothing about me aside for the fact that I work there and what very little personal information I give out.

Depending on which circle of friends I'm hanging out with, they also don't know much about me and have a completely different view of me.

Simply put, humans already act differently depending on what group they are with, and no group will ever really 'know' that person. A very similar situation occurs online. Sure it's easier to hide things about yourself online, but if you actually tried you could easily hide those things about yourself in real life as well.

The more involved and important the online community, the more we know about eachother. Of all the online communities I belong to, I probably have the most ties with Subspace and people know the most about me here. Other places people don't know I'm from Canada, or that I'm a doctor or that I even play online games. Compare with real life, where you can walk around a city holding random signs (i.e. crazy end of the world dude, the John 3:16 dude) and because the city is so big and there's so many people you have virtual anonymity to do whatever the hell it is you want. Sure someone might recognize you, but someone may track you down online too.

Community standards are also another topic which I don't know a lot about. At this point, from what I can gather (and unfortunately, generalizations are all that's available at this point) is that these standards are fundamentally different when two people in a conversation are behind an alias. But even when they're not behind an alias, i.e. facebook, the information there still comes from the individual, who can (and again, the assumption is that they do) manipulate that information to come off as someone they truly are only in cyberspace.

I think community standards are what make the world go round. Every social group has unofficial rules. In Subspace the rule is probably not to hack into the server which makes sense. People who blatantly cheat in this game ruin it for everyone else. People who hack into this forum and screw with the forum settings ruin it for everyone else. Sure there are 'official rules' (i.e. don't be racist) but it's the actual community standards which are important, and these are things that exist anywhere that humans gather, online included.

We're in agreement when it comes to the internet increasing communication. Absolutely. So did the telephone and telegraph. It absolutely increases the amount of communication, the speed of communication, and the quality of communication. When you say enlightened, what do you mean? When you are updated on everyone's statuses, is that enlightenment? How do we measure the quality of information that we receive nowadays? Blogs? Newspapers? Wikipedia? Bill O'Reilly?

You're big on the 'quality of information' and of people 'retweeting things they just heard'. Well how is that any different from real life? People spread gossip in real life, and false facts like no tomorrow because they heard it from someone else. People already use pretty low quality information for a lot of things. In my profession, everyone's an expert on health, but really 90% of people don't know anything at all.



Really if you look at everything you're saying you have found absolutely nothing new about human behavior, but in fact are just showing that people actually act online and do things that people do in real life (organize in communities, teenagers online act like idiots just like people in real life, people spread bad information).

As for the whole 'gambling and porn is bad' thing, who are you to say that is necessarily bad? You will need to actually prove that society is actually worse off because online pornography and online gambling exist, not because it just offends your personal moral values.


Finally, because your thesis is so strongly that 'Internet make society worse', you will have to devote a lot to showing that all the positives about the internet are not worth it.

Positives include (and this list is by no means exhaustive):
1) Online shopping allowing people to get best prices
2) Online cultural exchange.
3) Decreased transaction costs for communication, I can talk to my cousin halfway around the world for virtually free
4) Vastly easier communication for the scientific world which vastly helps facilitate progress via online collaboration, online publishing of results, etc
5) Vastly easier and more efficient business to business communication. I can design a product, find a company in China to make it online and get it shipped and marketed and sold here also online
6) A huge amount of information (closer and closer to the entirety of human knowledge) at the touch of a few keys which is so ultimately useful in so many ways
7) Things like google maps, or e-mail, or online collaboration (online desktop publishing for instance)
8) Anonymity which allows people to keep a better check on democratic societies i.e. wikileaks, and allows those in repressed societies to speak openly
9) Vastly improved shopping experiences for a myriad of things. Does anyone still use travel agencies anymore? I book all my vacations online.
10) Online learning - I've learned so many useful real life things online.. the most recent being how I take care of my marble tiles in my bathroom

[Bioture]

I don't really see the difference. People at work know absolutely nothing about me aside for the fact that I work there and what very little personal information I give out.

Depending on which circle of friends I'm hanging out with, they also don't know much about me and have a completely different view of me.

Simply put, humans already act differently depending on what group they are with, and no group will ever really 'know' that person. A very similar situation occurs online. Sure it's easier to hide things about yourself online, but if you actually tried you could easily hide those things about yourself in real life as well.

The more involved and important the online community, the more we know about eachother. Of all the online communities I belong to, I probably have the most ties with Subspace and people know the most about me here. Other places people don't know I'm from Canada, or that I'm a doctor or that I even play online games. Compare with real life, where you can walk around a city holding random signs (i.e. crazy end of the world dude, the John 3:16 dude) and because the city is so big and there's so many people you have virtual anonymity to do whatever the hell it is you want. Sure someone might recognize you, but someone may track you down online too.



I think community standards are what make the world go round. Every social group has unofficial rules. In Subspace the rule is probably not to hack into the server which makes sense. People who blatantly cheat in this game ruin it for everyone else. People who hack into this forum and screw with the forum settings ruin it for everyone else. Sure there are 'official rules' (i.e. don't be racist) but it's the actual community standards which are important, and these are things that exist anywhere that humans gather, online included.




You're big on the 'quality of information' and of people 'retweeting things they just heard'. Well how is that any different from real life? People spread gossip in real life, and false facts like no tomorrow because they heard it from someone else. People already use pretty low quality information for a lot of things. In my profession, everyone's an expert on health, but really 90% of people don't know anything at all.



Really if you look at everything you're saying you have found absolutely nothing new about human behavior, but in fact are just showing that people actually act online and do things that people do in real life (organize in communities, teenagers online act like idiots just like people in real life, people spread bad information).

As for the whole 'gambling and porn is bad' thing, who are you to say that is necessarily bad? You will need to actually prove that society is actually worse off because online pornography and online gambling exist, not because it just offends your personal moral values.


Finally, because your thesis is so strongly that 'Internet make society worse', you will have to devote a lot to showing that all the positives about the internet are not worth it.

Positives include (and this list is by no means exhaustive):
1) Online shopping allowing people to get best prices
2) Online cultural exchange.
3) Decreased transaction costs for communication, I can talk to my cousin halfway around the world for virtually free
4) Vastly easier communication for the scientific world which vastly helps facilitate progress via online collaboration, online publishing of results, etc
5) Vastly easier and more efficient business to business communication. I can design a product, find a company in China to make it online and get it shipped and marketed and sold here also online
6) A huge amount of information (closer and closer to the entirety of human knowledge) at the touch of a few keys which is so ultimately useful in so many ways
7) Things like google maps, or e-mail, or online collaboration (online desktop publishing for instance)
8) Anonymity which allows people to keep a better check on democratic societies i.e. wikileaks, and allows those in repressed societies to speak openly
9) Vastly improved shopping experiences for a myriad of things. Does anyone still use travel agencies anymore? I book all my vacations online.
10) Online learning - I've learned so many useful real life things online.. the most recent being how I take care of my marble tiles in my bathroom

Well a couple of things to note - first of all, I'm not suggesting that the internet makes society worse. This isn't a sociology topic or psychology topic, but it does involve a little of both, especially when we deal with the issue of addiction and secondary personas. This is an issue involving information technology. And the internet, its IT components, aren't inherently "bad" or "good" but it is how we've chosen to exploit it. So, yeah, it can help you with the marble tiles in your bathroom, but it can also teach your kids how to build pipe bombs, or get them hooked on playing WoW.

The funny thing about morality is that everyone views it as objective until they have to make their own personal moral decisions. Is that the evidence is that we have tons of IT products that tries to prevent access to certain things on the internet, and none of them really works, but they keep making them. When I was growing up I remember my school computer had netnanny on it. All you had to do was kill that process and there you go - search for all the anal sex you want.

Now about personal morality, I'll need everyone to examine themselves honestly. Would you as a medical doctor ever suggest to a parent to allow their teenage children to indulge in pornography and gambling online as a part of their natural growth? It is a part of our animalistic instinct to have sex and have fun, right? Again, its not the technology that's making anyone bad. But it's how we've chosen to exploit technology that reveals why it's so pervasive in our lives. And it is in the rationalization (about 99% of all the articles out there about why the internet is good/bad) that we've come to a point where we can brush it off as being human nature. So I'm not trying to find anything new about human behavior - it's quite the opposite. I'm trying to make the point that our current cyberculture is destroying certain fundamental methods of human interaction, because we cannot moderate our own consumption. The "proving" part is out of scope (and honestly, no one would admit it anyway), but I can ask you to find a community (not online, if you're really courageous) that embraces porn and gambling as being beneficial - I can link you to a ton of sites that say it's bad.

Better yet, I challenge anyone here to find a piece of information technology that has proven to be only used for beneficial purposes only, and has even progressed in it's helpfulness to mankind. I haven't been able to find such a piece of technology. A buddy of mine who's a 5th year doc student in the same field suggested the cotton gin. That was a good example except it's not IT, and that it tripled slavery in the south. So I guess it works for technology in general too.

[Bioture]

I can explain this phenomenon quite easily actually. In my media policy reform paper we were faced with the revenue issue and the question of where are the advertising dollars going and why? The answer on the internet is simply put: porn, gambling, and google. When we were in D.C. asking some media experts about why this shift was occurring and thus killing newsrooms, they provided us with a simple answer. There is no way to quantify and examine demographics of online users. In broadcast and print media there is a methodology of how to quantify your readership and tell what their demographics are, you then pitch that to an advertising company and they then give the targeted ads to where their demographic of buyers is. However all we have online right now is unique i.p. hits. There is no way to estimate with any certainty who visits where. Thus advertisement companies in terms of online have simply just given their ads to the highest unique user hits. Since 60% of all internet sites are porn, online poker has the most unique profiles and hits, and google is just about everyone's main search engine and homepage; that is where the ads go.

I would have to say that you thoroughly need to outline what the public interest is in your paper. Because there are many people who believe that the public interest is giving people what they want, and the internet fulfills that for many. They use what capital they have (in the broadest sense of the word) to get what they want, and that fulfills the public interest because it opens up a far greater realm of attaining what a person wants. However, others would argue that the public interest is what the people need. And if you argue that, well then you got a lot of work clarifying why they need your provisions and dealing with claims that it intrudes on people's inherent freedoms, and etc.

Also I don't see where your paper necessarily goes? Are your initial intentions simply to diagnose a problem? Or are you looking to prescribe a solution as well?

So what does the phenomenon say about how we're using the technology that is available to us, and the lengths we would go to protect it's exploitation?

The public interest is (and this will need much more evidence later on) that we're dying a death of a thousand cuts. While I can get people to admit that proliferation of these things are not good for their kids, I can't get the same people to admit they don't indulge in it themselves. Unless of course, they are anonymous. The solution I'm working on has to do with creating technology for enablement vs. technology for restricting access. Basically we have to accept what's going on as a part of human nature, but also focus on technology that inherently can be exploited to do good things.

So help me out here, internet community!

[Epinephrine]

Would you as a medical doctor ever suggest to a parent to allow their teenage children to indulge in pornography and gambling online as a part of their natural growth?

My job as a medical doctor does not include making moral choices for parents about how they should raise their kids. Similarly if I had an adult patient who was indulging in online porn or gambling I could care less unless it became a real problem for them. This is similar to say if I found a patient who drank alcohol of any age, it wouldn't matter to me unless it became a health issue. I would never tell parents to feed their kids alcohol, but then again I wouldn't tell them not to either unless the kid was so young it was actually unhealthy.

Better yet, I challenge anyone here to find a piece of information technology that has proven to be only used for beneficial purposes only, and has even progressed in it's helpfulness to mankind. I haven't been able to find such a piece of technology. A buddy of mine who's a 5th year doc student in the same field suggested the cotton gin. That was a good example except it's not IT, and that it tripled slavery in the south. So I guess it works for technology in general too.

If the entire point of your thesis is 'technology can be used for bad things', I really think that you don't really have a point at all and you need to look for a new thesis. This is sort of a common sense point as ANYTHING can be good or bad depending on who is using it.

Your other point seems to be that the internet is decreasing communication whatever that means. I'm not sure how something that fundamentally increases communication can actually be decreasing it, but you seem to have an overemphasis on stuff like poor grammar on twitter and people looking up porn as the reasons why ignoring that many people in real life have poor writing skills, poor communication skills and do moral things that others may not approve of.


Anyway there's nothing left to say really. Good luck with your thesis, if you actually finish it and do a good job, post it here for us to read. I'd be interested to see how you go about this.

[the_paul]

I wouldn't read a 200 page dissertation on the internet. Just take the parts where you talk about IlyaZ and Jeenyuss and internet badass PH and cut everything else out.

I'd read that

[RATTY...]

It's obvious that your work needs supervising from a teacher or professor.

Du "gaper over for mye" as we say in norwegian. Which subject did you major in? Which subject does this thesis go under? Sosiology or psychology? You need to narrow the topic down, as fast as it goes over to a subject you havent majored in or don't master, it's obvious that it's going to fail. And you have some serious problems with defining begrep?(nor)/conception?/words (not exactly right) which is important to the thesis.

A thesis is something within a single subject you're supposed to work on for 2years+ on the way as a Ph.D. It's not a project where you can take parts from different subjects.

- The thesis needs to belong to 1 subject, obviously the one you majored in.
- If you get accepted you're gonna research under that single subject.
- And within those two years - if the job is in the university, you teach the students in that subject.
- A thesis with different subjects on top of each other is automatic FAIL FAIL FAIL.

And last, getting advise from forumers - even though some are educated, is nowhere as good as going straight to a professor and ask him to look at your horrible work.