Picture
FROM FOX NEWS

How FarmVille Players Raised $1.5 Million for Haiti

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/09/farmville-players-raised-million-haiti/#ixzz1DW3CQm4h

The online world's biggest time-waster isn’t so pointless after all.

The World Food Program (WFP) has publicly thanked the virtual farmers on the wildly popular Facebook game FarmVille after they raised well over a million in aid for distressed communities in earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

Over the course of a year, FarmVille developer Zynga has collected over $1.5 million to help rebuild schools destroyed in the disaster. A video released by the WFP last week showed happy children finally back in the classroom. All in all, Zynga has already helped raise in excess of $4 million in Haiti relief funds.

The $1.5 million given to the WFP will go towards rebuilding a destroyed school in Mirebalais, Haiti, as well as helping students pay for food, supplies and other necessities. Over $1 million of the donations came from actual users, while the rest came from a generous contribution from Facebook Credits as well as a corporate gift from Zynga.

Last January, Zynga began creating limited edition items in many of its popular online games including FarmVille, FishVille and Mafia Wars that were purchased by users across the world, with Zynga agreeing to donate all proceeds to charity.

It’s a testament to the power of social gaming and exemplifies the potential for real-world change through humble virtual beginnings.

Often lambasted for being a waste of time and designed to exploit naturally addictive human tendencies, the game has generally been viewed in a negative light -- in part because of its immense popularity. Critics scold the game for its drain on human capital while in turn giving little back.

That Zynga has been able to leverage FarmVille’s huge user base towards humanitarian efforts is a boost for social-media advocates whose plights have at times been met with skepticism. For example, Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, The Tipping Point, and Outliers, questioned the actual impact of social media on activist causes in a much talked about piece in the New Yorker entitled “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted.”



Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/09/farmville-players-raised-million-haiti/#ixzz1DW356j7i
Add Comment
 
 
Its been a long time since I read an article so chalk full of ignorance, clearly it was reared on the media it purports to be "authentic".

See article below titled
---What makes videos go viral? Hint: Be authentic--
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/06/08/viral.videos/index.html

Sorry for linking that peice of shit. Here is what it takes to go viral:

1) Boob thumbnails.

2) Google and friends pushing the big fkn button that says GO VIRAL NOW

3) Braindead content and/or controlled disinfo

4) Advertising and youtube "partnerships".
Add Comment
 
 
Picture

SEE MORE VISUALIZATIONS

Add Comment
 
 
As the internet is slowly refined into 100% grade bullshit by Newscorp and the Genesis communications Network, Google has conceded to limit its news access after complaints from news whoring corporations that big brother was distributing their disinformation free of charge; disinformation which on the news whores own service required a fee. Google sometimes permitted users to view false information which they typically (increasingly) would have to pay for on many news web-shites. Google tells users not to worry because whatever bullshit fabricated news they remove from their searches they will be sure to supplement it with information which is equally narrow, and misleading and most importantly entertaining.
Picture
Add Comment
 
 

Of all the things in this world we could care less about, none could be more absolute then the fact that Ashton Kutcher is Twitters new spokesman. Like we could give a fuck that there are 1 million aspiring 'punk ass twits' who squander their hours outside of working shitty jobs to 'follow' Ashton's mindnumbing tweets detailing the latest staged victimization on his show punk'd or his wifes latest post-menopausal emotional discharges. But because this story was a redundant piece of shit that distracted people from the real world and promoted a service that would facilitate unoriginal narcisstic exhanges thus garanteeing a  fadulously degenerate mass of pre-cognitive morons, it was considered a worthy front page feature for the numerous conspiring multinational news agencies who have a vested interest in Twitters stock and the sociopolitical apathy the service breeds. Pardon that long sentence, its a good thing that I am not on twitter and can actually explain ideas concisely!

Its bad enough Twitter is being forced down peoples throats in its well orchastrated  news media marketing campaign. Whats worse is the promise of liberating our speech in 140 characters or less... Because nothing is more liberating then sending as many messages as possible with minimal depth. Yet again, our culture of consumption favors quantity over quality.

It should be no coincidence that it just sporadically became popular. Like out of nowhere. A quick search on any of the big news media agencies websites will yield countless stories ado with Twitter published in the last two weeks. And without this media attention what would Twitter be? The service itself is hardly innovative or unique, if anything its a lesser version of big brothers facebook. If only the service was publicized for what it really was: a tool of the global elite to devalue  the social interaction of the commoner to the point of redundance. Thanks to the 140 character limit of twitters microblogging platform, each tweet has the potential for about as much substance as a Bill O'reilly commentary and thats not counting teh commercials... A technology that suspends us in the infantile attention seeking circus that knows no end other then the end of our real relationships, and getting testicular cancer from exposing ones crotch to EMF laptop radiation constantly. What little interaction that ensues outside the internet is interrupted by obsessive texting, emailing, messaging fueld by our compulsion to know the trivial details of peoples lives they seldom attend to anymore thanks to twitter. In the future there will only be one relevant status: # 6, 889, 889, 000 is online. 

Twitters popularity
There is a reason everyone is talking about Twitter, the same reason everyone talked about facebook, its but another headway in an incrementally adminstered plan to know what everyone is doing at all times, all of our behaviors will be rendered into a virtual matrix which will be used to efficiently process any naysayer when the time comes, and sell us lots of green products to save the environment until that point Its only partly ironic that such a technology need not be forced on anyone, rather its absorbed readily by the self-esteemic void of the uncritical mass in their desperate attempts to express their individuality through these limited communicative stencils. Hoping perhaps that someone will recognize them as a bonafide individual, with their witty one line status updates, fleeting 15 seconds of fame, schizophrenic Twitter word salad wisdoms, and the forever virtually embedded digital persona, while as a collective their capacity to engage and organize for the purpose of progressive social action diminishes accordingly...

When you see a product being discussed on mainstream news ask yourself, of the thousand products available similiar to this one, why is this one receiving so much attention? Why does this service get free advertising on the news while your longwinded diatribes attacking the global elite cant get published unless they are on some shitty do it yourself website no one will see??? BECAUSE YOUR A BITCH SLAVE AT THE COMPLETE WHIM OF THE MEANS PROVIDED BY YOUR OPPRESSOR!!! DIGITAL HEGEMONY!!! YIPPIEE!!! FUN!!! GOOD TIMES!!! WHATEVER YOU DO DONT ASK WHO OWNS THE MEDIA!!! YOU CRIMINALLY OPEN MINDED HATE FILLED FUCK!!!

Twitter conspiracy?  Oh This is only the beginning....

Its coming...

A message from an enlightened tubester

For more on digital oppression see:

http://www.fadsmashers.com/19/post/2009/04/nanoblogging-facebook-the-real-wikipedia.html

http://www.fadsmashers.com/19/post/2009/04/facebook-philantropy-and-the-digital-revolution-digg-linked-in-facebook-stumble-upon.html

http://www.fadsmashers.com/19/post/2009/04/youtube-publishes-video-condemning-its-own-censoring-practices.html

Add Comment