#4 Second Life :)

Hello everyone! Wow, it has been quite some time since I last blogged. Well, dont blame me, my assignments and projects are seriously overloading and taking a toll on me. Life of a second year student :( Anyway, lets get busy talking about my Second Life Experience the other day ! :) Honestly, this is the first time I am actually playing an online virtual game haha Oh wait, if you consider my less-than-a-week experience playing MapleStory then Second Life would be my second virtual game haha. I am just reiterating the fact that I am new to this virtual game and I have to say, I am not really good at it. Firstly, I tried logging on to Second Life a week earlier to familiarise myself with it and there was a major problem teleporting! I could not teleport, everytime I tried to, a pop-up will appear saying that I have been logged out. After the fourth try, I was very agitated and decided to ask my friend for help. She logged into Second Life and invited me to teleport to Temasek Polytechnic and join her there. Lucky for me that worked out quite well :)

Alright, so lets get on to my experience of Second Life with the Hong Kong students that Tuesday night. So, when I reached Temasek Poly Island, there were already quite a fair bit of people. All of them were confused and were asking each other whether there were anyone form HKPolyU there. Seems like all the people there were from TP. After a few minutes, some HKPolyU students started replying. However, there were so few of them that the TP students were trying their best to get hold of one. Suddenly, a guy chatted and said "Hello DhirahTP(me) I am from HKPolyU". I was seriously so excited that he was the one who initiated the conversation. He then "offered friendship" via SecondLife, and we chatted in a private chatbox. Below is a picture of the scene I mentioned.
His name was Ahun, and we got off to a very good start. We started off with general questions like hobby, diploma and age. Most of the time, I am the one asking him questions haha. Ahun is 25 years old, loves to play football (just like most of the guys I know haha) and he is pursuing his Masters in IT. His dream holiday is Japan as it has nice sceneries for him to admire. He is also a free-thinker, does not belong to any religion.

He then asked me if I had Facebook, after much chatting, he added me on Facebook. So, we are now friends on Fb! Interesting, I then realised his name was actually Alex Hun! We chatted some more and he told me (exact words) "Singapore has strong power" haha. I think he is referring to our government and the stability in our country? I'm not really sure. He said that there are alot of talented people and people obey and stick to the rules here in Singapore. He then continued and told me he wants to try to work in Singapore as the technology and finace here seems very good. He was the only responsive HKPolyU student in SecondLife to me and my groupmates. Below is a conversation we had regarding Singapore as I had mentioned. Oh! I forgot to add on that he loves Taiwan Pop Music :) 

After much chatting, we got down to some, well more serious topic, that I was supposed to ask him for my EIR assignment.

Q1)  Is it ethical to use social media for harmful effects (eg cyberbullying, impersonation, terrorism, violence)? Why?

Alex (aka Ahun) said it is not acceptable to use the social media for such stuff as it is not morally right.

Q2) How can you use Social Media in a more responsible way?

He told me to use social media in a more responsible way, one must avoid watching non-moral things such as videos of terrorism, bullying or violence on the internet. There should be a warning followed by deleting or blocking accounts that spread fake messages or news to cloud the minds of other people.

Q3) How do you protect yourself from bad effects of Social Media ?

He said to avoid yourself, do not ofter give out your personal information on the web.

After much chatting, my group, together with Alex (aka Ahun) went to our dream holiday destination. It was a unanimous decision and we agreed on Paris. I had problems teleporting, it took quite some time before I could finally teleport. My groupmates helped me :) Below are the pictures taken at Paris Rive Gauche. We walked around saw different activities as those side-walk artist going on and some nice scenaries.


 





We also visited the Dubai Women's College (picture above) haha we wanted to have some fun and really explore SecondLife. We took a longer time (2 hours!!) than the allocated time given to us. Alex (aka Ahun) was so sweet, he sticked with us throughout our whole experience in SecondLife.