The virtual "world"

I remember during one of our lectures, our lecturer briefly mentioned something about the virtual world vs. the real world. Or rather, which of those worlds is real.

Now, I never gave this much thought. I always thought that this world that we physically inhabit is the real world. This computer in front of me, the shoes on my feet, my friend sitting next to me. Those are real. Ipso facto, that is the real world.

But is it really?




When I was a little younger, I used to spend the majority of my time on the computer either playing games or being online. Often my mom would tell me, "Stop being so anti-social," and basically to come back to the "real world".

Just because I was online didn't mean that I was being anti-social. When I was online, I was often chatting with my friends. Those friends were (and still are!) real. Would I categorize them in the virtual world or real world (considering they were not physically present)?

I feel as though the line between the virtual and real worlds is a fuzzy concept. It is neither present nor absent, dividing nor uniting.

Then are they really two seperate worlds?

Or...do we really need to define exactly what the real world is? Wouldn't defining as such imply that there is a world that is unreal?

Granted, online gamers get a lot of flac for devoting so much of their time to a seemingly pointless hobby that does not have any real life application. However, they earn money, recognition and sometimes prestige (in their circle, per chance?) It has even come as far as being a profession.

Some people even make a living out of being just a blogger. No day job. Just blogging. An example of this is the famous Singaporean blogger Xiaxue. She earns money directly from her blog. Companies pay her to do advertorials. She earns thousands of dollars from just one advertorial.

Now that's a job!

So maybe the "real world" is an ancient concept where one had to do things in the physical world.

But the computer is a physical-world embedded object. Doesn't that count?

Choose your weapons wisely

I always knew that life was full of choices. From the trivial and mundane to the downright life-changing, we always have some kind of decision to make. What should I eat? What should I wear? Should we get married? Decisions like that.

We've all made decisions to get where we are today, most of which to benefit our lives in some way.

How young were we when we started making our own decisions? Are we ever too young to make decisions?

Education-wise, I've been making decisions since I was twelve. Thinking back on it right now, I feel like twelve is much too young to be making these kinds of decisions.

But back then, it didn't seem like such a monumental thing. I was just picking a class. How big is that supposed to be?

Of course now, I think it wasn't the best decision. I chose to do computing. Didn't like it. I still don't like it.

I learned after that.

More years went by and I had more choices to make. I chose French. I chose music. I chose art. I chose Math. I chose product design. I chose Japanese. I chose English.

I made all these decisions with one thing in mind: I will excel and I will enjoy it. (which I did for the most part)

I've always looked at school life like it was a war. All my deadlines and goals were battles I had to win.

Essay due tomorrow? Kill it.
Exam later? Kill it.
Reading tonight? Kill it.

To win these battles, you have to make decisions.

So choose your weapons wisely, friends.

The right weapons will guarantee you victory.

Choose poorly, and that will be a loss that you'll need to live with.




I'm only thinking about decisions because we're nearing the end of our green form nonsense. This is the last chance we have to choose our classes. And that scares me. I'm hoping I've made the right choices.

I hope to win this! Bachelors, you are going down!


I meant degree, of course. No offense, single guys!

Online personas: Who are you?

With the internet being ubiquitous and the advent of social media services like Facebook, Twitter and Blogger, I can't help but notice the clear divide between the virtual and physical worlds and with these worlds, people seem to adopt multiple personas.

Now I know that we all have multiple identities i.e student, daughter, sister, etc, but do online personas really fit into that? Whether we are online or not, are we not still the same people?

I'm not looking at this philosophically or what have you, it is an honest question.

I suppose we are all guilty of doing this sometimes, where we pick a nice picture for our Facebook profiles and untag ourselves when an unattractive picture surfaces on your wall. But if people already know who we are (or at least aware of who we may be), why do we still fiercely defend our online identities? If our Facebook friends already know who we are, exactly what image are we trying to protect?

OK, I admit that protecting my image is quite important. I want to present myself how I want to be perceived.

What I don't understand, however, are online personas. When people have online alter-egos that are completely different from who they seem to be in the physical world. Different names, different appearances even different personalities.

There seems to be a sense of security and safety in the virtual world. You can say what you really want to say. You can look how you really want to. You can act how you really want to.

I am amazed at how people feel safer sharing these things online. 

I'm even more amazed at how some crave for attention online.

Perhaps there really is a different world online?

Phonetics & Foreign Languages

I really hope I'm doing this right.

While sitting in our infinitely fun Phonetics & Phonology class, we briefly looked at both Scottish English and Korean (what was being demonstrated was whether [ɾ] and [l] for both languages were the same or different phonemes).

Growing up speaking English, I always knew that [ɾ] and [l] are different phonemes in English. Having taken Korean for two and a half years, one of the difficulties for me was that the letter ㄹ is realized as both [ɾ] and [l]. So whenever a word had ㄹ, I was never completely certain whether it would be [ɾ] or [l]. I knew whether it was [ɾ] and [l] if I had learned the word, but that was from memory and not deduction. I never had a method for figuring this out until yesterday! (Much thanks to our lecturer for making me see this)

For example purposes, I'll use two words: 빠르다 - pʰɑɾədɑ (v. to go fast) and 말 - mɑl (n. word)

See? Already, the ㄹ is realized as both  [ɾ] and [l]. Now look at this:

• When the verb 빠르다 [pʰɑɾədɑ] becomes an adverb, it is 빨리 [pʰɑɫɪ]
• When 말 [mɑl] is given the object marker, it is 말을  [mɑɾəl]

Note:
빠르다 [pʰɑɾədɑ] → 빨리 [pʰɑɫɪ] : To go fast → quickly

말 [mɑl] → 말을  [mɑɾəl] : Word → word (obj)

Now for the fun part: Why?

While learning Korean, we were always reminded that ㄹ is an odd consonant that students always had to be careful with it in both speaking and writing.

So what we did in class yesterday was first divide the word into syllables (I will follow how the Korean words are divided into syllables):

빠·르·다

pʰɑ·ɾə·dɑ

빨·리

pʰɑɫ·ɫɪ

말

mɑl

말·을

mɑ·ɾəl

Next was to determine the distrubution/placing of [ɾ] and [l] in the syllables and we end up with:

1. [ɾ] is found in the onset of the syllable
2. [l] is found in the coda of the syllable
3. HOWEVER, when two ㄹ occur consecutively within a word, it is realized as [ɫ] both in the onset and coda of the syllables in which the ㄹ occurs

Anyway, my whole point is that I think that learning phonetics and phonology would be undeniably beneficial in learning foreign languages (this sounds a little dubious, but I am a sporadic optimist). No doubt it would assist in learning languages with the Latin alphabet, but imagine how easy it would be to incorporate phonetics into learning languages with their own scripts. Japanese. Korean. Chinese. Greek. Gregorian. Imagine. (Though you could argue that it may be more difficult to learn IPA in addition to a foreign script)

I'm sure this is being done somewhere. I just think it should be done everywhere.

And because I have a pathological love for Scottish (and Irish) accents:

It's not even relevant to what I mentioned in the beginning about Scottish English, but I really could not get this song out of my head since I typed "Scottish" out.