Goldfarming and its effects on identity

Goldfarming is a topic that completely new to me before this class. Iｔ was interesting to learn about ｔhis social phenomenon from the economic viewpoint, its effects on the fairness for other gamers, and from the gold famers’ perspective in class, and the most unexpected effect　that gold farming has was its effect on the gold farmers’ identity.


In this video clip that one of the gold farmer, Lao Liu, directly　expressed his feeling of being called a gold farmer, “Foreign players call us Chinese farmers; I am very sensitive to this term. I have a sense of inferiority.” This sense of inferiority begins with the gold farmers’ inability to communicate. The language barrier is still a big factor even in the virtual game world. Unable to communicate means that the gold farmers can not explain their situations, they can hardly make friends with the foreign players, and not even defend themselves verbally when confronted with a hater. Another gold farmer also mentioned communication as the biggest difficulty, “The biggest problem is communication. As long as you can communicate, even a policeman and a thief can become friends.” As they conveyed unable to voice their opinions is a suppressing factor for their identity and a big hit to their self-esteem.

The gold farmers’ sense of inferiority is further imposed by the resentment towards them from the regular gamers. The gold farmers constantly being remained the “evil” or corrupt nature of their job that brings to the virtual world of gaming. There is a group called project gold farmers by American gamers, and they believe that they make the world of warcraft a better place by killing the gold farmers.　"20 people camp in the places that gold farmers usually at and kill them, and it was a lot fun." The feeling of rejection and being hated resonates for the gold farmer, “If they know you are a Chinese farmer, they would say you have no right to be here, and they have the right to order you to leave or even attack you with no reason.” This level of hatred from some of the regular gamers can be seen, from the gold farmers’ viewpoint, as personal rejection from the gaming community at larger, because the farmers also want to play the game as a regular gamer after the completion of their work quota. “We want to play with foreign gamers, form groups and take on some quests together. Often I really want to tell some friendly foreign gamers. Let’s play together, but I don’t know how to say in English,” expressed by Ge Jin, the gold farmer in the video clip. Another factor that deepens the negative impact of gold farming is the long working hours, the 12-hour shift results in a life constantly revolves in the gaming world. For　the　gold farmers the virtual gaming world is not virtual at all, it is a constant part of their lives.

Even in reality, there is rejection for the gold farmers regarding to their job. “The society does not credit this job; no culture accepts gaming as work. My family also dose not accept this job. From their old views, play as work is impossible. They think it is too unreal, they don’t understand what we sell, and think we are just playing all the time.”

Despite the difficulties for the gold famers, they also see the positive in the job. “It is not just for money but also for fun. There is a sense of achievement”. Another gold farmer explains in the video clip, “The good thing about being a gamer is we can play the best and newest games in the world. And another thing is that it is really difficult to find a job in China. It is really difficult. As a gamer you can have an income, though not much, it’s still a happy thing.”

I think this is a very complex social phenomenon, and as Ge Jin and Lao Liu expressed, the negative impacts are quite damaging to their identity, and hopefully in the future the gaming community be more tolerate of the gold farmers, after all, they are just regular people trying to make a living.

More Interesting Report :
Digital Culture From NPR
China's 'Gold Farmers' Play a Grim Game

Online Identity and Reputation Management

I think most of people had googled themselves. For some the search results are pretty normal and reflect their online activities, but for others the top search results can be unexpected. My teacher, Annie, who is married but did not change her last name, the reason for this, she found out when she googled her married name and the top search result is a woman, who has the same name with her, is looking for a sexual partner for her husband.  This discovery is a quite compelling reason for her not to change her last name, and plus she does not think the married last name is quite as sexy sounding as her maiden name. 

In this day and age our online appearance is important, personal identity and reputation not only exist in real life but also online. More and more companies use the internet as a tool to find information about their potential employees. A survey by CareerBuilder.com found that one in four hiring managers used search engines to screen candidates. One in ten also checked candidates' profiles on social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook. According to a December 2007 survey by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy research organization, approximately half of the U.S. hiring officials use the Internet in evaluating job applications. Those statistics should be a considerable reason for anyone who wants a career to start managing his or her online identity and reputation, so I ask what exactly is online identity and reputation management and how to make it work t advantage.

According to Personality in cyberspace: Personal web sites as media for personality expressions and impressions, online identity management can be consider as online image management or online personal branding, in which a individual generates a web presence that reflected in any kind of content that refers to the person. The content can be personal web sites, blogs, forums, social networking sites, picture, and video and so on; then the goals of online identity management are expand the positive online references about ourselves, especially on search engine, build an online identity or presence if there is none or minimal, and finally resolve any existing online reputation problems.Wow, that is a lot of things to look after and worry about, but luckily, if there is a domain for something there are always services fulfilling that need, so there are several tools that aim to simplify this process.

For Starters, Google alerts let you keep track and search what is being side about you online. Garlik.com also works for a similar purpose that is searches the web for any mentions of your name and protect your online personal information. Then the webs that help you manage and verify your identity across multiple websites, claimID.com, MyOpenID.com, and FindMeOn.com.

Online Identity Theft: Collision of Two Worlds

I always thought a person’s online life and real life should be separated. I neither use my real name nor give any personal information to any social networking sites, and I write my personal blog under a false name. For me, this caution and guard online was mostly for a sense of escaping from reality and expressing myself more candidly without all the judgment from people I know in real life. But I never thought there is also an added benefit to this: online security.

Identity theft crimes are on the rise continuously. According to 2007 Identity Fraud Survey by Javelin Research, 8.4 million Americans became the victims of identity theft in 2006; especially for young adults, age 18 to 24, the rate is almost twice as other age groups. This mostly because the leading targets for hackers and identity thieves now are social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Use Facebook as an example, the vast amount of public data on Facebook make it much easier to impersonate, damage, and even steal identity. There are several tactics used by identity thieves to obtain Facebook users’ personal information, common ones are using phishing sites that fool users into revealing their credentials, linking website or email that leads user to a web page that install malicious software that can secretly collects their personal data, some of the malicious software record all the keyboard inputs, and in more interesting cases, the criminals become “friends” with users as a way to gain more access to personal information, this tactic although sounds harmless enough compare to the others, in a study by the anti-virus software company Sophos, they found that 41% of people accepted friend requests from Freddi Staur, a made-up identity that is based on a plastic frog. More specifically, Freddi invited 200 random Facebook users to its friend. 87 out of 200 accepted and 82 of those gave up personal data, such as birthday, places of birth, employers' names, addresses, photographs of family and friends, work resumes, and in some cases, the user's mother's maiden name. This study is quite revealing of the low self-protection of the young generation.

As one of highlighted importance of privacy in Marx’s article Privacy and Technology, "the ability to control information about the self is linked to the dignity of the individual, self-respect and the sense of personhood," and this is just a fundamental reason for protecting our privacy online. We need to be more aware of the information we are putting online, and realize the impact that the information may have on our lives both online and offline.

Someone Else: A Different Identity Online

Click the picture to watch the entire program


As we are getting more connected to the internet, the benefits and convenience are easy to see, and the issues are starting to surface. In current years, more internet related news are popping up more frequently, so much so that PBS Frontline did an program, Growing Up Online, specifically addressing and uncovering some of the issues. In the program, one of segment is Self Expression, Trying On New Identities, in which features a girl, Jessica Hunter in real life and Autumn Edows in cyberspace. Her story chiefly is that Jessica always felt she was an outsider that never fit the mold, but at age fourteen, online modeling brought her confidence, fans, and fame. She wholeheartedly embraced her new online identity, but once her pictures were discovered by the school authorities and were deemed offensive and inappropriate, Autumn had to be deleted and Jessica was left to face the consequences.

In her interview, the thing that I found most fascinating was the way she hid her online identity completely, “I would lie my ass off just to keep my identity sacred,” which led me question that is Jessica protecting Autumn, her online identity, from reality? Or is Jessica protecting her fantasy world from reality? And why wouldn't her identity be sacred even if it is exposed to her real life? Is letting her parents and friends to know her other identity ruin the purpose of it? And what ultimately is the purpose of her online identity? From this point, Jessica explained further, “I didn’t feel like myself, but I liked the fact that I didn’t feel like myself. I felt like someone completely different.” This quote of hers reminds me the feeling that I had before and I think a lot of others also felt at least once in life: I wish I was someone else. More specifically, someone that is “better” than me. In Jessica’s case, Autumn was popular, she had hundreds of online friends, compare to Jessica’s real life, Autumn seemed to be the better one.

Surprisingly, it may be true to some extend, in the article Granting Personality to a Virtual Identity describes online identity as “usually (in most cases) embellished to make the physical person appear more intelligent, sexier, skinnier or bolder. The personality chosen usually embellishes what the person already has or aspires to be.” In a sense that Jessica just presented a better version of herself, and the big difference is she presented it online. Maybe if she tries to present a better version of herself in real life, she might make friends and be happier, but we know it is not that easy to change people’s perception about you, a clean start is pretty much not possible, but online she could freely express herself with control over the negative judgments from others, for example the hurtful comments can be deleted by her. This control over one's identity and interactions with others is a incredibly liberating experience that is quite unique to this medium.

Social Networking and Identity Formation

After reading “Evaluating the Social and Cultural Implications of the Internet” by Philip Brey, I found the lists of both perceived benefits and harms of the internet open more room for discussion and questioning; specifically, on individuals’ identity formation. Dr. Rosen did a research on the topic of social networking (MySpace) and identity formation and the finding and implications are quite fascinating. Here are some of the highlights:

“More time spent on MySpace is related to slightly more depression, more Internet addiction, less family support, slightly lower self-esteem and more online friends.

Teens are spending large amounts of time communicating on MySpace with school friends and many people they have never met in person..

There are many positive ramifications from time spent on MySpace including more support from friends, more honest communication and less shyness both on and off MySpace.

Most parents believe that there are many sexual predators on MySpace and that the media portrayal is accurate. Strikingly, most parents have never seen their teenager’s MySpace page or their photos and do not know how much time their teen is spending on MySpace Many parents are not aware of what information their teens are giving out to other MySpacers and those who think they know; underestimate the information offered by their teenager on MySpace. Parents allow their teens to have a computer with Internet access in their bedrooms and few set limits on computer or MySpace use. Even those who do set limits fail to follow through much of the time.”

The negative effects mentioned in Brey’s article are the relative anonymity which allows actions that can lead to antisocial behavior and ultimately lead to harming of psychological development and internet addiction in general. But as Dr.Rosen’ research illustrates, on the social networking sites, teens are spending most of the time communicating with real life friends and with their real names, pictures, and information on the websites, the relative anonymity is not easy to acquire, and the addiction of the internet, is the cause of the addiction mainly because of the attractiveness of the internet, which in social networking is the sense of community and connectedness, or the addiction merely a symptom of a larger issue?
One of the noticeable findings of the research is that while the parents believe that their children may well encounter harmful information or people online, they do not know anything about their children’s online activities and do not even set a time limit for their computer use. This reflects the amount of caring and attention that is giving from the parents; then is the internet a way for teens or individuals to look for the attention and stimulation that is missing in their lives? The positive effects of the internet stated by Brey, which are encouraging the experimentation of alternative identities and the exposure of different beliefs and perspectives without encounter some obstacles in real life. Those positive effects are mirrored in the search findings, such as promoting of honest communication, overcoming shyness, and the chance to meet new people online, which can leads to improving social skill. Overall, the social networking is a good tool that could greatly increasing individuals’ social life, well-being, another source of emotional connectedness, and a path of many to self-discovery, but it is should be an addition to a solid life.

Welcome to My Blog

Hello :)

This is my e-life blog. I will be updating this blog regularly. Although I am not sure about the specific topic for the blog yet, I will decide on it soon.

I am really excited about the e-life class, since this subject is very new, different and interesting.
A little background information about me, I am originally from China. I am currently a Computer Science major and I quite enjoy its straightforward and logical nature.

Thanks for reading my blog !