Social Desirability in Virtual Communities

The metaverse, a virtual space where users can interact, create, and transact with digital assets, represents a new frontier in human interaction and commerce. However, the legal landscape of the metaverse is complex and still developing, and it presents several challenges and considerations for intellectual property, privacy, and jurisdiction. This paper aims to provide an overview of the legal challenges associated with the metaverse and to identify potential solutions for addressing them. Applying legislation for intellectual property in the metaverse is a complex issue, as virtual worlds and online communities can involve collecting and sharing large amounts of personal data. A combination of technical, organizational, and legal measures may be necessary to protect intellectual property. Finally, it is still being determined who has jurisdiction in the metaverse, as virtual worlds and online communities can cross international boundaries and involve multiple legal systems. Jurisdiction in the metaverse can refer to the authority of a government or legal system to regulate and enforce laws in virtual environments. The paper concludes by highlighting the need for interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and addressing the legal challenges of the metaverse and the importance of creating specific laws, regulations, and policies that will balance the competing interests of different stakeholders.

Solace in Social Media: Women Unite Under COVID-19

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the internet has provided a much more dynamic platform, becoming more visual and allowing users to interact with each other in communities and share information in real time. The new Internet is a social media, and online communities are taking on a new dimension, quite literally, in the form of immersive 3D virtual worlds, such as such as Active Worlds, OSGrid, and Second Life. Surprisingly, 80% of active internet users have a registered account in virtual worlds which are playing an increasingly important role in the lives of many adults, teens, and children. Indeed, virtual worlds are believed to have implications that go beyond how we play, to also include how we buy, work, and learn. In recent years there has been increased behavioral research in virtual reality and virtual worlds. As a result, the subject of virtual world has become a major research area in recent years. To shed light on virtual worlds’ trends, and contributions, a historical review and Bibliometric analysis are included in this research. The Bibliometric analytical technique was used to examine this topic in SSCI journals from 1991 through 2011. Also, the study investigated whether author productivity conformed to Lotka’s Law, to understand author distributions within the field of virtual worlds and to elucidate the distributions of the core authors.

For many of us, obesity is the outcome of an energy imbalance: more energy input than expenditure. However, our waistlines are growing in spite of the huge amount of diets and fat-free/low-calorie products available to cope with this issue. Even when we are able to reduce our waistlines, maintaining the new size is very difficult: in the year after the end of a nutritional and/or behavioral treatment obese persons typically regain from 30% to 50% of their initial losses. A possible strategy for improving the treatment of obesity is the use of advanced information technologies. In the past, different technologies (internet, virtual reality, mobile phones) have shown promising effects in producing a healthy lifestyle in obese patients. Here we suggest that a new technological paradigm - Interreality – that integrates assessment and treatment within a hybrid experiential environment - including both virtual and real worlds - has the potential to improve the clinical outcome of obesity treatments. The potential advantages offered by this approach are: (a) an extended sense of presence: Interreality uses advanced simulations (virtual experiences) to transform health guidelines and provisions in experiences; (b) an extended sense of community: Interreality uses virtual communities to provide users with targeted – but also anonymous, if required - social support in both real and virtual worlds; (c) real-time feedback between physical and virtual worlds: Interreality uses bio and activity sensors and devices (smartphones) both to track in real time the behavior/health status of the user, and to provide targeted suggestions and guidelines. This paper describes in detail the different technologies involved in the Interreality vision. In order to illustrate the concept of Interreality in practice, a clinical scenario is also presented and discussed: Daniela, a 35-year-old fast-food worker with obesity problems.

Understanding the Design of Mobile Social Networking

The paper outlines a new paradigm and its underlying rationales for implementing networked learning environments that is emerging from new technologies such as multi-user platform, virtual worlds, virtual learning community, and intelligent agents. The proposed paradigm of the networked learning environments is described as inhabited virtual learning worlds (IVLW), which is a shared learning space in 3-D format and populated with avatars that are the representations of learners who are geographically dispersed around the world. The virtual learning worlds are also composed of objects such as intelligent agents and learning materials. A pilot system is created based on the discussed rationales of inhabited virtual learning worlds. A preliminary empirical study focusing on the selected learning behaviors in young learners also has been conducted with the pilot system. The results of the empirical study and suggestions for enhancing the pilot system are discussed in the closing section of the article.

With many people now using online communities such as newsgroups, blogs, forums, social networking sites, podcasting, videocasting, photosharing communities, and virtual worlds, the internet is now an important site for research. Kozinets' (2010) new text explores netnography, or the conduct of ethnography over the internet - a method specifically designed to study cultures and communities online. Guidelines for the accurate and ethical conduct of ethnographic research online are set out, with detailed, step-by-step guidance to thoroughly introduce, explain, and illustrate the method to students and researchers. Kozinets surveys the latest research on online cultures and communities, focusing on the methods used to study them, with examples focusing on the blogosphere (blogging), microblogging, videocasting, podcasting, social networking sites, virtual worlds, and more. The book is essential reading for researchers and students in social sciences.

Virtual friend recommendations in virtual worlds

Today’s youth, aged 8-18, are avid media consumers, as evidenced by usage trends on sites like YouTube and Facebook, and from ever-increasing participation in online videogame communities (Rideout et al., 2010). New social tools for creating and viewing user-generated content present a substantial shift in the ways that participants in youth culture leverage electronic media to interact and learn from each other. The Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that social media participation is relatively universal among high-school-aged youth across the United States, irrespective of race or class (Rideout et al., 2010). Furthermore, the lines between consumers and producers are being blurred in such spaces, what Jenkins and others refer to as the new “participatory culture” (Jenkins et al., 2009). The extent to which youth move fluidly between consuming and producing media is a by-product of widely available creative tools and Web 2.0 platforms that enable youth to experiment with technology that was previously the exclusive domain of professionals. Notable pockets of youth are creating and sharing media, with some studies even suggesting that 77 percent of social network teens are creating some type of content (Lenhart and Madden, 2007). Though some studies argue that teens use social media platforms primarily for consumption (Chau, 2010; Pempek et al., 2009), longitudinal trends indicate that production practices are steadily on the rise; for example, 39 percent of online teens electronically share original artistic creations (such as artwork, photos, stories or videos) up from 33 percent in 2004, and one in four teens also report remixing content they found online into their own creations, up from 19 percent in 2004 (Lenhart and Madden, 2007). This type of media production denotes a “creative turn” (Sefton-Green et al., 2011) in ouruses of new technologies and brings often overlooked aspects of creativity to the fore. The purpose of this chapter is to take a look at the ways in which social media spaces can be leveraged for creativity, paying particular attention to the ways in which social media support youths’ creative production. Creative production within online learning communities highlights the ways in which youth are appropriating, critiquing, and making novel contributions today. We examine these ideas by first highlighting relevant research in both the fields of creativity and social media. We then present examples from notable online communities, including Do-It-Yourself (DIY), Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs), and other online communities where youth are actively involved in creative activity and discuss the implications for research on creativity.Finally, we discuss the implications for today’s youth, the potential social media holds, and why such vernacular forms of creativity are important for learning and development.

3D multi-user virtual environments (MUVE) bring new opportunities to foreign language teaching and learning as a platform for teaching practices. Due to immersive and interactive nature of 3D MUVE, these tools have gained popularity in the field of foreign language learning and teaching. The power of virtual learning environments lies in creating immersive 3-D spaces that give users a sense of learning by doing. Moreover, the environment is interactive and is much the same as real world interaction. MUVE provides strong support for synchronous collaborations, interactions, and immersive environments for experiential and constructivist learning settings. Some key features of the virtual worlds comprise the ability to construct 3D environments that simulate real world situations, as well as the ability to have a virtual identity to create a cross-cultural self and the ability to have participants from around the world acting virtually in designated roles that convey new types of learning within this environment.

In today’s world, people increasingly rely on mobile apps to do their day-today activities, like checking their Instagram feed and online shopping from websites like Amazon and Flipkart. People are depending on WhatsApp and Instagram stories to communicate with local businesses and to leverage the said platforms for online advertising. Using Google Maps to find their way when they travel and finding out the immediate road and traffic conditions with digital banners around the road, has obviously led to a boom in advertising and marketing. Recently, internet users have increasingly desired to immerse themselves in a Metaverse-like platform where they can interact and socialize. Meta’s Metaverse is a tightly connected network of 3D digital spaces that allow users to escape into a virtual world. It is designed to change the way you socialize, work, shop, and connect with the real and virtual world around you. These platforms are not fully submerged in the real world; they are inclined toward virtual spaces only, making it obvious to fill this gap. Thus, the proposed framework in this chapter would be a new kind of system that may develop a socio-meta platform, powered by augmented reality and other technologies like photogrammetry and LiDAR. Augmented reality provides an interactive way of experiencing the real world, where the objects of the natural world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual vision. One of the significant problems with augmented reality is the process of building virtual 3D objects that can be augmented into real spaces, which could be solved with photogrammetry and LiDAR. Photogrammetry is the technique of producing 3D objects using 2D images of a physical object taken from different angles and orientations. LiDAR, on the other hand, is another 3D reconstruction technology used widely by Apple’s eco-system. The functioning of LIDAR is very similar to sonar and radar, and the detection and ranging part are where it stands out from the others. The idea behind this platform is to open tons of virtual dimensions in the real world using the principles of mixed reality and geographic mapping tools such as Google Maps, MapBox, and GeoJSON; it would consequently transition the way people spend their time on social media by opening a portal for generating 3D objects that can be augmented to the real-world location using photogrammetry and cloud anchors by just a few 2D digital photographs taken from their camera.

Social media platforms serve as virtual communities where communication, interactions, and social connections arise, significantly influencing the formation of individuals' cultural identities. Humor is one of the cultural elements that spreads widely across the virtual world, which originated through social media, and the youth category is one of the strong groups that follow digital content, and young people are usually attracted to humorous content in particular, which reflects their daily experiences. Through young people sharing jokes and humor, the bonds between them are strengthened and their sense of collective identity is enhanced. Humor circulating on social media also influences the behavior of young people, serving as a tool for expressing opinions and alleviating daily and life pressures. Despite the positive aspects observed in the dissemination of humorous content across various social segments in general، and among young people in particular, we cannot ignore the negative effects some of it can have Humor can manifest in social interactions as mockery and bullying, highlighting the dangers of the rapidly spreading humor found in the digital sphere. Therefore, this research aims to examine the role and risks of humor disseminated through social media platforms, which significantly influences young people's opinions on social issues. Humor is a powerful and accessible tool for attracting attention, as it simplifies concepts and presents issues in a straightforward and humorous way that captures interest and sparks discussions on all topics relevant to society. The social survey method was used to analyze and study the phenomenon, employing a questionnaire as the data collection tool for the research topic. The study was conducted on a purposive, random sample of 50 individuals, distributing the questionnaire to students at the University of Mosul. The research yielded several key findings, including: - Social media platforms are important for disseminating and acquiring knowledge, communicating with others, and opening channels for social interaction and the exchange of experiences. - Humor circulating on social media provides a platform for young people to freely express their desires and opinions on local and global social issues. - The humor promoted and shared by young people is a double-edged sword, depending on the topics discussed, the methods of presentation, and the individuals and situations depicted.

The rise of online communities in Internet environments has set in motion an unprecedented shift in power from vendors of goods and services to the customers who buy them, with those vendors who understand this transfer of power and choose to capitalize on it by organizing online communities and being richly rewarded with both peerless customer loyalty and impressive economic returns. A type of online community, the virtual world, could radically alter the way people work, learn, grow consume, and entertain. Understanding the exchange of social and economic capital in online communities could involve looking at what causes actors to spend their resources on improving someone else’s reputation. Actors’ reputations may affect others’ willingness to trade with them or give them gifts. Investigating online communities reveals a large number of different characters and associated avatars. When an actor looks at another’s avatar they will evaluate them and make decisions that are crucial to creating interaction between customers and vendors in virtual worlds based on the exchange of goods and services. This chapter utilizes the ecological cognition framework to understand transactions, characters and avatars in virtual worlds and investigates the exchange of capital in a bulletin board and virtual. The chapter finds strong evidence for the existence of characters and stereotypes based on the ecological cognition framework and empirical evidence that actors using avatars with antisocial connotations are more likely to have a lower return on investment and be rated less positively than those with more sophisticated appearing avatars.

Extended-Reality Technologies: An Overview of Emerging Applications in Medical Education and Clinical Care.

Virtual worlds are quickly becoming a popular way for teens–especially younger teens 13-16 years of age–to spend time connecting with existing friends while searching for new contacts. According to KZero, in the third quarter of last year alone, 92 million new, unique users joined virtual worlds. However, as virtual worlds grow, teens are looking for more opportunities beyond just building their personal networks. Enter virtual goods–items users can earn or purchase to express themselves creatively or to gain status among their peers in a community. Those who have not spent time in online communities and worlds find it difficult to understand the motivation for purchasing virtual goods. But buying them or completing tasks to earn them is fun and challenging, in the exact same way shopping or playing games in the real world is fun and challenging. For example, some virtual goods provide an immediate advantage in games or contests, some help express your personal styles and interests, and some can be sent as gifts to friends. Sometimes people buy virtual goods because they’re impatient or competitive and don’t want to wait the number of days it would take to earn them for free. But fundamentally, virtual goods are entertainment–they make it fun to interact with friends and express personal styles.