Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Da Vinci – these great painters almost certainly began their portraits with a sketch. To follow in their footsteps, I too will initiate the portrayal of myself as a media user in a particularly “sketchy” manner. I admit that I relish impersonating fourteen year old girls and twenty-four year old men on my MySpace account. It is true that I have attempted to consume MIT’s massive bandwidth by creating a voracious torrent swarm. However, these actions do not make me some malicious miscreant meandering around the internet. Instead, they show that I am the typical media user who simply wants to extract all possible uses out of technology, communication, and social networking.
MySpace affords users more than just a daily journal and a social network. Through the construction of fake accounts, it gives people the ability to test the fidelity of a boyfriend or girlfriend. Perhaps a more fun application is uncovering a younger sibling’s “dirty little secrets,” which can then be used as blackmail when chores are to be done.
When it comes to downloading, I have the utmost regard for copyright laws. Yet, I still find myself downloading the Windows 2003 operating system and leaked music albums which are to be released next week. Repeated abuse of technologies such as BitTorrent and LimeWire is perhaps the most effective way to persuade businesses to increase allocation of resources for the research and development of encryption and security measures that would protect intellectual property. I would like to see the day when all media is safe and protected; to this end, I have become interested in seemingly science fictional ideas such as unbreakable quantum cryptography and virus protection algorithms based on the biological immune system.
While I am not trying to solve these problems of the universe, I can probably be found in my room, hunched over a computer, with a bluetooth headset in one ear and ipod headphones in the other. Chances are I would be playing some computer game such as StarCraft. Here I can escape the troubles of the real life and immerse myself in a fantasy world where I have an army of zealots, dragoons, and carriers at my command. It is my task to defeat the Zerg race, commanded by some randomly selected foreign aggressor who resides on the other side of battlenet, and thus possibly the other side of the world.
Disillusioned upon return to the real world, I turn to Wikipedia8 for comfort; here I name myself commander of some battalion in the Peloponnesian War. I instant message my friend and tell him to check out the change I made. However, by then the change has been corrected, and I must content myself by contributing some arcane detail to some esoteric topic.
Meanwhile, the high frequency waves from my bluetooth head set have continued to lightly singe my neurons. In an effort to restrengthen my synaptic junctions, I check out the news feeds from websites such as BBC. Or if I desire a lighter read, I head over to digg.com and “digg” any technology, sports, or entertainment articles that I find particularly interesting. After receiving my dose of current affairs, I proceed to the Art of Problem Solving math forums where mathematicians from all over the globe discuss challenging math problems and advanced techniques of solution.
Now in a more productive mood, I turn to my ongoing website development project which I am coding in ASP.NET using C#. Finally, when I can procrastinate no longer, I complete my half-started problem sets, scan the solutions, and save them on the 2GB memory stick which I always carry on my key ring. I finally make time for my HASS homework; however, the distractions posed by iTunes and streaming music videos on Yahoo Launch cause the assignment to take an exorbitant amount of time.
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