Touchdown!

The Phoenix has successfully landed on Mars. View a short video here (you'll have to put up with a small commercial first...) and some pictures here.

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Time For Bed

Last night was crap night shift and I'm beat, so, after having some tea and toast and checking my emails, I'm off to bed for a few hours.

Best I can manage at the moment is a few links (which I saved from yesterday's surfing)...

The realities of Dr Who versus Star Trek
This movie, The Surrogates, looks interesting.
Yay, there's going to be a Terminator 4
Retropolis T-shirts
Memorable robots

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Saturday Silliness

You've heard of the Fame Bubble, haven't you? Tip of the hat to SQT for the laugh.

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MySpace Pets

Social networking has grown exponentially over the years and there are many applications such as Twitter, Tagged, Facebook and MySpace that cater for this. Each application has add-on programs that can enhance the experience, but is the experience always going to be a good one?

MySpace has one called Pets and the concept is simple enough; you buy one of the friends on your 'friends list' as a pet. At face value I can see how this can be a bit of fun, especially among some older, more mature people but I do worry about what effect it might have on one demographic, that of the teenager.

The teenage years can be trying even at the best of times but for so many young kids, there's bullying to worry about (which now extends to cyber-bullying on mobile phones AND places like MySpace), and even if we leave the bullying out for a moment, there's still that more general issue of acceptance or popularity among their peer groups.

So much of a young person's self-image (and the flow-on to self-worth) can be tied in with whether or not they fit in with other kids and as we know, kids can often be the cruelest in excluding others from their social cliques. How would a kid feel if, for example, they were on somebody's friend's list but were never bought as a pet? The more people that buy a particular individual, the more that individual's worth in pet dollars increases; what happens when kids start doing comparisons of their 'worth'?

There are many good little add-ons for these programs but I think this one is fraught with danger for many.

Not only that but I have some trouble with the concept in general. Why? Because, to buy a pet implies ownership and ownership of another human (even in the supposed fun and friendly guise of a pet) just makes me think of slavery; history is not one of my strong subjects but I would have thought that there are plenty of places in the world who have a less-than-savoury history with slavery and would shy away from anything that even remotely related to it.

I dunno. Am I being too sensitive on the issue? Call me a killjoy but I can't help wondering when I'll be watching the news to hear of another school shooting somewhere in the world, and when the dust has settled, the investigation will reveal that it was done by some kid whose value as a pet was less than everyone else's and who simply got sick and tired of being bullied or teased about it.

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