Alone together

Hello again!

This will be our last blog post and today's topic is about how technology is changing society and relationships.
We watched a video entitled "Connected, but alone?", a speech from a psychologist called Sherry Turkle, and we are going to discuss it.

"Alone together" tries to explain the feeling that we experience when we are physically together but our minds are in a virtual place, looking for a different way of interaction.
Scenarios like groups of friends sitting around the same table but not really enjoying this social situation or even preferring to stay home instead of actually meeting people, in order to connect to a virtual network. We never feel really lonely if we keep being online because it is easy to receive an actual and real-time feedback from friends everywhere.
The most typical example in students' life could be how we automatically look for our devices as soon as we get bored during a lecture. Even when we actually go out to enjoy real world's opportunities, we share those moments with our online friends via virtual channels, like if we need more and more socialization.
Turkle's point of view on this topic sounds more dystopian but still she keeps some positiveness about the usage of online communities, focusing on the fact that we just need to find the right balance between virtual and real life relationships.
When she talked about our will to escape loneliness using social media it really made us think about our own experience and we cannot say this is not a real problem.
She raised our awareness on this issue because it is not so easy to realize while we are just doing it in our everyday routine and maybe someone of us will acknowledge that in the future.

That is also the reason why we are leaving this blog to his destiny and we say a huge Goodbye to our numerous fans around the world!

Talk to you never,
With love,
Mörököllit :)

L.M, J.J , D.C, M.H, S.L, M.M, A.J, E.L

Second Life

Hei! This week we will present you this online game: Second Life.
It takes place in a virtual world which is created by our own imagination and everyone can be part of it. It seems to be a diverse universe as everything is possible to create, time periods are mixed there, you can choose to be a vampire or anything your mind will tell you and decide where to live this adventure. This is an odd environment where people try to escape from their everyday life by expressing their creativity without the limits of the real life. It's a good place to discover and improve your artistic talents in creating digital contents.
The inhabitants or avatars are called "residents" and can be made by anyone regardless their age or gender. The players can create a new identity or just make their digital version of themselves and nobody can find out the truth.
This game offers some characters that you can personalize by improving their clothes, changing their shapes.
Pictures from this game on Google show every kind of extravagance and this one is not the weirdest at all.

It's possible to talk and to socialize with other players. There's even a social network for chatting outside of Second Life. The community is the main attraction that keeps players interested in spending a lot of time into the game. And since the creation in 2003, the community has grown and become interesting to study. 

Today, more than one million residents live in Second Life's world and keeps increasing. One of them could be you?

See you next week!

   A.J, L.M, E.L, M.M, J.J, M.H, D.C, S.L

BesTravel

Today a new company was born: BesTravel.com will bring all students to their dreamed destinations with a small budget.
Travelling across Europe was never so easy, because we work with the best organizations, from students' to hotels, to offer you an amazing experience.

For some tips, check out our blog and join the community. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter and you can see some of our stories on Instagram and YouTube, shared directly from who have already traveled with us: one day you could be one of them! We are offering well-known bloggers the chance to travel with us and in exchange they write about their experiences with us on their blog.

Every month we will arrange new special offers made just for your needs, so stay tuned to our channels and subscribe the newsletter by clicking here. On Facebook you will find all the information about our website, and events for the organized trips are posted there also. And on Instagram with  our hashtag #BesTravel, you can post your memories from your trip and participate in our monthly contest. We also have a YouTube channel, which contains videos from our travel destinations.
You may have heard about us on different blogs or seen our banners. You can find campaign codes from the blog posts.

We have a place for feedback and questionnaires on our website. This is our way to keep our customers content and receive valuable information how we can improve our services.

Be sure to check it out. Happy travelling!

                                                                                                                                                                                

            A.J, L.M, E.L, M.M, J.J, M.H, D.C, S.L

Be careful about who you trust

Hello people!

This time we are going to discuss trustworthiness among different websites. We have chosen two examples to look at the differences between a trustworthy and an untrustworthy website.

Thinking about trustworthiness, we chose the worldwide-famous website TripAdvisor:

First of all, its good fame makes users feel confident about reviews and opinions and very often they also enjoy to share their own impressions because of this good atmosphere that exists in the community. Secondly, TripAdvisor makes the communication possible between consumers and companies, in way that it is almost impossible for both sides to lie. Another reason to trust the website is its good looking design because it is clearly made by professionals and very easy to use.
Also, TripAdvisor takes into consideration users' feedback and dedicates an whole section of the website to the "Help Center", where everyone can post opinions and tips to improve the using experience. Last but not least, the language used is grammatically correct, which means a lot for trustworthiness, but it is also possible to have informal conversations between users on the dedicated forums.

On the other side, we found a good example in one of those "miracle-weight loss" websites: extremesupplements.net.

The first thing we noticed is the uncomfortable interface, very difficult to read and giving a bad feeling to the readers. Looking closer, the text seems impossible to believe because everybody knows that chemical pills cannot substitute exercises and diet. More, there is no space dedicated to users' feedback, which makes everything look even more suspicious, exactly the opposite of the full transparency we found on TripAdvisor. We tried to click on the "testimonial" link to see what would appear and that's what we found:

Some words have to be spent also on the advertising on the left of the page, showing one kind of "discount" on this product:

The bodybuilding package is now for only 149.90$! (instead of 149.95$)

The website tries to convince people using an easy communication, made of short sentences and with a lot of capital words sentences, with scientific claims and descriptions about the pills, insisting on their efficiency. Finally, on the page they deny the cheap and low-quality products other websites are selling, which makes us wonder how we can be sure of their quality, if every other place sells the same low-quality product.

Which one would you trust? If you have already bought something like the extremesupplements.net is selling, please let us hear about your experiences!

Until next time!

A.J, L.M, E.L, M.M, J.J, M.H, D.C, S.L 

Happy Valentine's Day!

Hello again!

This week we tested out Evite and made invites to an imaginary event at Get-Fit gym. We decided a gym would be perfect for us as a sender, because fitness is closely related our theme, lifestyle.

There are great Valentine's Day -themed invitation desings on Evite and we chose one with a classy, purple desing. The style fits well for a gym and it is very inviting for the customers.

This is what our invitation looks like

 
The invitation text informs about the event and also tells a little what the gym is like. We added some playful textuality with the poem, and considering the occasion the whole text has a positive tone.

 

Our invitation shows that fitness is a important part of our theme of lifestyle. It is a great example that whether you are single or in a relationship, you can have fun and be active on Valentine's Day!

See you in a couple of weeks!

A.J, L.M, E.L, M.M, J.J, M.H, D.C, S.L 

Pinteresting!

Hei-hei!
This week we're going to introduce you to our new Pinterest board. We started to pin some student life related pictures and we had some fun doing it! You can check them out here if you're interested in a complete experience about this. Here are a few samples:

As you can see, we would like to share with you some sad-but-true moments of students' daily routine like milk stealing or bike freezing. We really hope you enjoy watching them and don't hesitate to show us your best ones!

Our board can actually be divided in two groups: the first one is about studying and commitment while the other one's about enjoying free-time and surviving daily life as students.

Some of those pictures were already on Pinterest, but we also took a couple of them from an Italian humour Facebook page and uploaded them. You can take a look to that here.

One of the pictures is especially important and unique because it comes from one of us:

The only picture we really de-contextualised is the one with bike covered in snow, because it wasn't originally about student's life but it fits our purpose perfectly, especially because it's such a familiar situation for students facing the weather of Vaasa.

That's all for this week,
Stay tuned!

L.M, E.L, A.J, M.M, J.J, M.H, D.C, S.L 

Runner's world community

The site we chose our forum from is called the runner's world community. It is available in many countries in the world and since our group is from different countries it is relevant for us. It was also a natural choice for us because of our theme. In our opinion sports are one of the most important part of lifestyle. This site is aimed at people who are interested in a healthy lifestyle. The forum is divided in different topics such as: people (beginners, women, teams..), places and different kinds of sports (marathons and so on..). In order to chat on the forum discussions you have to own an account. Usernames don't have to be real names, you can have a nickname in the discussion. The forum is moderated but they cannot control every piece of content so that's why they encourage people to report trouble to them. There are six rules for the forum that people have to follow when they post which are quite common also in other forums.

We found different lexical and syntactic characteristics in the forum discussion, for example new words the users came up with (slogging = slow jogging), emoticons, informal language, shortenings, capital letters to emphasize their feelings and first person pronouns were common. They used a lot of short sentences and we also noticed that especially the older members used a certain pattern. They mentioned their goal and the experience they had and also cheered for each other.Textual characteristics we found included multimodality, like you can see in the last picture.

M.M, J.J, A.J, S.L, E.L, M.H, L.M, D.C