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« January 2006 | Main | March 2006 » February 27, 2006no CHI for me
I have to say, i'm also quite shocked at the hike in fees. [For those who are used to industry fees, this is quite expensive for an academic conference where even the presenters pay.] I thought i was going mad until i saw Jofish's visual of the registration costs over time: I know that putting on conferences is expensive but i really wish i knew what registration fees went towards. I also wish monetary-related decisions were more transparent, particularly for conferences that are not-for-profit. Are there reasons to keep attendees in the dark about what their fees pay for? Like Jofish, i also wonder about the implications that this fee hike has for interdisciplinary discussions when members of less-funded disciplines cannot attend. Making CHI only affordable to the CS folks is not a good thing. And i cannot even imagine what it must be like to be outside of the Euro-American corridor where most of these events occur. Or to be a graduate student who has no funding and never has the privilege to attend. It's scary to think about the ways in which the academy work creates fundamental biases in knowledge production. Category: academia
Posted by zephoria at 12:48 AM | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0) February 26, 2006AirTroductions
Social software *should* be able to help but there are so many barriers to this. You need to articulate too much and who has time? Still, as broken as they are, i'm interested in exploring the tools that might lead to entertaining interactions or at least to the development of better systems to do so. One of the ones i'm curious about is AirTroductions. Yeah, it kinda has dating overtones to it, but i'm still curious if it'd ever work. At the very least, who else is en route to Etech or SXSW or IASummit when? I have to imagine that lots of folks i know will be passing through the same airports in the next month. Anyone else willing to give it a try just to see? Note: one of the options is: "someone who won't talk to me at all (I just want to read/sleep/work)." You don't have to be stuck sitting next to a chatty person even if you want someone to share a cab with at the airport. You also don't need to change your seats to use the service - i intend to use it just to find out who else is in the airport with me. Category: social software
Posted by zephoria at 4:38 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0) what is vulgar in academia?
Today, i was told that i could not submit an abstract with "MySpace whores" in it and was encouraged to change it to "MySpace prostitutes." Of course, i was like no no no... that's not the term people use. I think that it is wholely inappropriate to alter cultural terms when trying to talk about the culture. I unhappily agreed to remove the entire segment from my abstract but made it very clear that i had every intention of talking about "MySpace whores" given that the talk is on friending practices in MySpace and the term comes up in almost every conversation i have with people. The response? "i don't care how vulgar you get in your talk. that will be only a reflection of you and not of me." Wow... that was harsh. Am i vulgar to be using the terms that people use? Sure, one could make an argument that their terms are vulgar to elitist ears, but i'm studying a culture filled with all sorts of shall we say... interesting... terminology. If i were speaking to an audience of anthropologists or gender studies folks, no one would bat an eye. Why am i suddenly lacking decorum when i move to disciplines filled with mostly straight white men? Because hegemonic decorum doesn't recognize the language of less privileged populations? Hrmfpt. Category: academia
Posted by zephoria at 3:23 PM | Comments (25) | TrackBack (0) February 25, 2006call for Blogher speaker on sensitive topicsAs Elisa wrote, i'm leading a panel at Blogher on blogging about sensitive topics and we're looking for potential panelists who are willing to talk candidly about the most sensitive of topics - depression, addiction, self-injury, eating disorders, illness, suicide attempts, infertility, etc. We're looking for people who've written about these topics and those who've tried to support loved ones. We want to talk about the values of writing about sensitive issues, the challenges of being read, the concerns about responding to someone's intense writings. Especially around issues self-injury, eating disorders and suicide attempts, we'd like to get into how writers feel when they are reported by concerned loved ones. We know that support happens. But we also know that that there are those who believe that bloggers and online community members can become enablers, or at the very least, get in over their heads. Rather than reaching out to people with a "So, you talk about suicide a lot, wanna talk on a panel?" type question, we wanted to throw it out more broadly and see who might be willing to talk. So, this is a call for speakers who would be willing to discuss their experiences handling the touchy topics online. And please note: we are open to only identifying you by a a pseudonym in conference materials. If you're interested, feel free to email me or Elisa. Update: To those who have responded, i will get back to you shortly - we need to meet and figure out exactly what we want and how we want to balance speakers. Please be patient. Category: blogging Tags: blogher
Posted by zephoria at 12:58 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0) "Academics: Get to work!"I'm not sure if i should be offended or excited by John Dvorak's latest post Academics: Get to work!. On one hand, he argues that "we need social studies about the Net and computers" which is great because i couldn't agree more. Besides, that sounds like a statement that will keep me in business for a while... But on the other, his example is the lack of analysis on MySpace and blogging. Uhh.... ::raises hand:: There are quite a few academics studying this stuff from all sorts of different angles. People from communications, linguistics, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology... Now, whether or not anyone is listening to them is still an issue up for debate. But at least on a personal note, i would argue that there are a few people listening to me about MySpace and i've been rattling on about it since 2003, albeit on a limited basis on my blog in an attempt to not be accused of corrupting my data. And there's no doubt that i've been rattling on about blogging, LiveJournal, Friendster, tagging and quite a few other "Web2.0" schtuff. So, i'm a bit confused by Dvorak's column. Anyone closer to him have a sense of what that's about? Category: web2.0
Posted by zephoria at 12:40 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0) February 19, 2006AAAS presentation on MySpace dataToday, i did my first proper presentation of the data i've been collecting on MySpace. "Identity Production in a Networked Culture" looks at how youth use MySpace for socialization, identity production, and hanging out. In particular, i investigate how and why youth are (re)creating a public in digital space. I've uploaded a rough crib of the 15 minute presentation that i gave there since i suspect some of you might be curious what i've been thinking about with respect to MySpace. This talk was part of AAAS in a panel called "It's 10PM: Do You Know Where Your Children Are... Online!" The panel was an unbelievable collection of quant and qual researchers thinking about these issues from all sorts of perspectives: Justine Cassell, Amanda Lenhart (PEW), Henry Jenkins and David Huffaker. This talk went over exceptionally well (much to my surprise). Two teenagers who whispered to each other the whole way through the talk came up to me afterwards to tell me that what i said was true. A mother told me that her 15-year old son would surely thank me because she now understands that there is a positive side to the Net and she wants to start a conversation with her son about it (she had been banning access). Other parents told stories of their teens and quite a few thanked me for putting the scare issues into perspective. I have to say... it was one of the most rewarding talks i've given. I feel like i might have done some good in the world... Category: myspace
Posted by zephoria at 11:15 PM | Comments (52) | TrackBack (2) February 17, 2006Bradley Horowitz is blogging!Bradley Horowitz (one of my bosses over at Yahoo!) has the most interesting things to say about the emergence of social technologies. Because we felt as though he should share this brilliance, Jeremy and i have been on his case to blog for quite some time. Now he's gone and done it! Yay!! In his opening post, he addresses how sites like Upcoming.org, del.icio.us and Flickr will scale, talking about value creation and the need to recognize that not everyone needs to be a producer for these things to work. In triangle form, this means:
Anyhow, check out his blog to read more brilliant insights... [Oh, and all of you bloggers out there... get your bosses to blog... it's quite a hoot!] Category: social software Tags: bradleyhorowitz yahoo
Posted by zephoria at 2:11 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) February 16, 2006knowledge systems and collective questioningIcarus Diving has the most hysterical post called Google the Magnificent which addresses the peculiarity of a "how do you use" search on Google resulting in the following suggestions:
As he puts, "Wow! That's amazing! I had no idea I wanted to know any of those things! And wasn't that a great example of what Web 2.0 has to offer? Well, keep at it guys. Any month now you'll be making the same impression on people that paper clip thing on Windows did." I cannot duplicate the humor of his post, so read it in full. I reference this because i think it is a really important issue. We often talk about the power of collective knowledge/questioning and the transparency of such information without thinking about the moral issues. On one hand, it's a fascinating insight into what people are looking for. On the other, it's kinda disturbing. What if the queries were "How do you use a machine gun?" or "How do you use a hanger for an abortion?" ::shudder:: Regardless of where you stand on these issues, such queries would make you want to reach out to the person asking them, to see if you can help them. But you can't. Does the machine have a moral responsibility to prevent people's dangerous acts? Most people would probably say no. But what if the machine makes its knowledge transparent to people? What happens when those people feel responsible but only the machine has the ability to communicate back to the person in trouble? Furthermore, how would you feel about your own query (or about the system) if a suggested query like that came up? The things that disturb our moral senses stick with us; they are hard to get out of our heads. Sometimes, there are costs to making the knowledge of a machine visible to people unrelated to the interaction between the person and machine. It's eavesdropping and it's not always wonderful to overhear things. Category: web2.0 Tags: information queries
Posted by zephoria at 11:36 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0) February 12, 2006from the future looking backwardsA friend and i realized that there are numerous historical perspectives that we cannot imagine believing. The idea that people of color are a different species from white people. The idea that the world is flat. It just seems so foreign. So i started to wonder what commonly held assumptions of today's society will we look back on with absurdity? Any ideas? Category: social observations
Posted by zephoria at 1:53 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack (0) February 10, 2006lessons from the WoW debacle
While i should celebrate this positive change of affairs, my sunny spirits have been dampened by the ways in which participants justified Blizzard's decisions in the commentary of many blogs, on mailing lists, and in person. It has been a real eye-opener at how much unchecked homophobia swirls around me, both from within the queer community and from without. I'm not talking about the overt "faggot" homophobia; i'm talking about the homophobia that comes from failing to recognize systems of oppression and privilege. When i wrote my post, i made some assumptions about my readers, about the people around me. I feel the need to explain the assumptions under which i am operating. Imagine a world where a woman is told that they can't talk about being a female because that would be encouraging people to attack her and thus it would be not permitted and would be deemed sexism. My hope is that most people can recognize that this is absurd. Of course, the funny thing is that we live in that world anyhow. In technical fields, we are often told that if we talk about being women, we are complaining. We are told that we live in a meritocratic world where women are welcome so they should just stop complaining. Yet, the reality is that being female is not just about the XX chromosomes, the estrogen, the boobs and hips. It's a situated identity that cannot be untangled from experience. Sure, we can try to out-male the men (and many of us do indeed try) but the standards are still separate. We are still read as women when we walk in the door, whether we like it or not. We live in a sexist culture and pretending sexism doesn't exist doesn't make it go away. Tis the reason that i have much appreciation for Malcolm Gladwell for using narrative in explaining research to make this issue more visible - even when we think that we aren't looking at race and gender, we are. If we said that we should not talk about being female, everyone would be assumed to be male and judged on that manner. You don't create equality by removing the experiences that alters embodied identities... in those terms, the oppressed will always be oppressed, systemically. There's a huge amount of sexism in WoW - even in watching over others' shoulders, i've seen my fair share of "don't be such a girl" and comments about the femininity/masculinity of particular characters' representations. Would a sexism-free space be acceptable to the majority of users? I have to imagine that few people would say that is oppressing sexist bastards. Sexuality has always been a more complicated picture because the debate is rooted in issues of morality. I will never forget the first time i was asked why gay people had to highlight their butt-fucking to everyone by marching down the streets. ::shudder:: This is when i realized that from a heterosexist point of view, "gay" is read as a set of practices, not an identity. It is assumed that when a group of queer people gather, they do so to fuck. This is just as stereotypically problematic as saying that when a group of women gather, they do so to bake. Sure, it does happen, but it is by no means the sole reason to gather... Gatherings happen based on identity, based on a set of shared values and views about how the world works. It's about creating safe space where you don't have to have your walls up high, have to be on constant guard for attacks, don't have to constantly defend your view of the world. It's a way to keep sane more than anything else. And it's a way of being able to cope in a culture of oppression. The problem i have with people saying it's equivalent to a hetero-friendly guild is that hetero-friendly is the norm. Heterosexuals are not an oppressed population; they can walk proud on the street, show their love on TV without question, bring their partners to the company picnic without fear, have children without worrying how their love will affect their children. They don't have to worry about feeling silenced by comments such as "you're such a straightie." It's simply not the same. Of course, i'm totally in favor of Blizzard keeping it a PG-13 (violence permitted) environment. I totally understand why watching two characters fuck would not be appropriate, but i don't think that the gender of the characters matters. The thing is that is fundamentally different than eliminating identity. And queer is an identity first and foremost. Fantasy worlds may not need to have sex, but they do have to have identity. And people's lived identities seep through whether we like it or not. To silence only the oppressed individuals in a system is beyond dangerous; it promotes a society that i can never support. I also understand why some people are afraid to reveal their sexuality to young people for fear of being attacked, perceived as a pedophile (although more straight folks abuse children than gay folks), or thinking that sex should not be mentioned to children. The problem is that we've all been taught that to talk about our sexuality, our identity, is the same as bringing sex to the conversation. That's a dangerous dangerous thing to internalize and i implore queer folks to stop doing that. No one should be talking about their sex life to children, but that doesn't mean you should hide your identity because people have told you to be shameful of yourself. Young people need to know queer people as regular people - this is how tolerance is formed. I respect that Blizzard has made the economically responsible decision to stop this tomfoolery. But i think that this issue is also critical for general societal reflection. Silencing people because of their identity is a dangerous proposition. We've done that a few times in our history to deadly ends. Let's not do that again. Category: gender & sexuality Tags: WoW homophobia
Posted by zephoria at 1:51 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0) more reasons to love Jean LaveSometimes, people tell you what you need to hear at the exact right moment, even when they themselves do not realize it. As i mentioned before, i'm taking this amazing course this semester. What i'm beginning to realize is that it is not the brilliant readings that are of value to me so much as the ways in which it is helping me frame academia and research. As i am starting to admit that i won't be in graduate school forever and taking steps towards dissertation, all of my neuroses about the academic process are coming out full force. (Of course, this is not helped by the layers of bureaucracy and hoops that are required to move towards graduation.) Last fall, i submitted my IRB ("human subjects") forms for approval. The stack was a small tree. On Tuesday, shortly before class, i received "conditional" approval for my work and was told that i would know what i needed to change within a month. How i love the slowness. These IRB forms have been weighing on me. In order to step through that hoop, i had to list every question i would ask my subjects in a sort of formalized script, exactly how i would recruit my subjects (including the exact wording), the hypothesis of my research that i am testing, etc. These forms fundamentally conflicted with how i believe good ethnographic research works. Sure, i could do an interview study from this but my whole project is about hanging out amongst youth, both online and off. Of course, interviewing will be a part of it, but there's so much more. But to say exactly what that will be has felt so unreasonable that it took me six months to file the damn forms because i had a complete panic attack every time i looked at them. I finally sucked it up and tried to articulate everything i could. Yet, i still felt as though i had failed. I failed to account for the times when i sat on the 22 overhearing teenagers' commentary following school. I didn't account for the invitations that i receive to sit in on people's classrooms, special programs to keep teens off the streets. I didn't account for the times when teens saw my MySpace shirt and came up to me to tell me their story. Eeek! And then, in discussing Beamtimes and Lifetimes, we started talking about the process of doing ethnography and the dangerous assumption that ethnography is the same thing as an interview study. Having been involved in a backchannel about how Traweek's project could've possibly gotten through IRB, i piped up and said that i thought that people conflated the two because of the amount of formalism required to get through IRB. Jean's response was priceless. In essence she said that you have to submit the forms to the best of your ability but "you don't have to do what they say." IRBs are there to protect the university, to make you think about ethics, but they don't know how to handle ethnography and the most important thing is to create a list of your ethics and to stick to them, to really be accountable to yourself - "everybody ought to write their own ethics statement and follow it." I told her about the formalism of the forms and she laughed and said "gracious me, throw that stuff out the moment you're done." She reminded us that ethnography can't be done that way, that we will all fail ourselves. "Be careful, if you say you're going to do this tight-assed medical model stuff, you might end up doing it." At one point, one of the students spoke up: "remember, you're being recorded." She laughed, smiled and said, "that's okay, send it to the committee." Category: academia Tags: ethnography ethics
Posted by zephoria at 12:06 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0) February 6, 2006girls in boy-wear
On that note, check out this Pink video about "stupid girls." (tx Tom) Category: gender & sexuality Tags: fashion
Posted by zephoria at 10:44 AM | Comments (31) | TrackBack (0) how DRM fucks academicsOne of the cardinal rules of doing ethnography is that you keep everything. Normally, this concerns the physical world so you keep letters, receipts, photos, anything that you can possibly get your hands on. We're all still trying to figure out what this means in digital land. During my work on Friendster, i was terrible about keeping records. I should've kept copies of Profiles; i didn't. I should've kept copies of funny videos and other such stuff; i didn't. I very much regret this, because so many of those Profiles were deleted and now i have no record of what all happened. But then again, i didn't think i was doing research. Mistakes made, lessons learned. So, now, i'm really doing research. And i'm trying to keep copies of things that i analyze. Of course, saving every webpage is difficult so i fully admit that i'm doing a poor job of this. But my bigger problem is that i want to keep copies of the video that i run across. The bulk of it is on YouTube locked down by DRM. Although there are ways of getting this out of YouTube, going from flv to something usable is a bitch on a Mac. And damned if i can get .flvs working on a Mac. The thing that is going to kill me about all of this DRM bullshit is how it completely eliminates fair use. I should be able to keep copies of these videos and mark them up as artifacts. Instead, i'm locked out. Unfortunately, explaining the DRM problem to committees who want to know why you aren't storing the artifacts is impossible right now. Gah. Frustrating. Category: techno doom Tags: drm
Posted by zephoria at 12:34 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0) February 5, 2006how to kill emailRumors are (once again) flying around that people are going to be charged for sending email, postage stamp style. The details are uncertain, although the NYTimes has their version; apparently, Yahoo! and AOL are involved in this and there will still be free email, but paid for email will be given priority. The logic is (always has been) that companies should have to pay for bulk mail in order to minimize spam. There are arguments concerning the effectiveness of this and there's the issue of variable global economies and how this might hinder poorer companies, non-profits, and anyone who doesn't have the economic capital of the porn industry. There are lots of good arguments on both sides, but i don't want to focus on that. What i want to highlight instead is an aspect i haven't heard discussed in the context of this: email is already dying amongst youth. Right now, most of us in our 20s view postal mail as the site of bills and junk mail; the occasional letter and package is super exciting, but we can almost always predict those (they are usually correlated with birthdays, holidays and the one-click button). For youth, it's the same story with email - you get notices from parents, adults, companies, junk mail, and the occasional attachment that was announced via IM. Add postage stamps to this and email will become even less valuable; your friends won't pay for it so the system will highlight the companies over your friends - yuck. Even those who appreciate sending email will be alienated by turning this into a capitalist enterprise. Yuck. Bye bye email, hello IM and SMS and alternative asynchronous message systems. There's nothing like giving corporations a preferential position in the system to destroy a communications platform. Category: youth culture Tags: email
Posted by zephoria at 4:54 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (1) defining religionOn Friday night, i got into a discussion with a group of friends that reminded me of the kind of discussions that used to keep us up all night long back in college. The discussion centered around religion (from fundamentalism to spirituality). Being in the heart of LA, one of my friends was trying to assert that worshipping the TV is religion. I challenged him to define religion. In doing so, i had a flashback to a comparative religions class where we spent the bulk of the semester trying to do so. Like many categories (i.e. "game"), religion is difficult because there are no clean boundaries or common qualities. At the same time, i realized that i have an operational definition because of a single conversation i had three years ago. Religion has three components: primary religious experience + core tenets/scriptures/narratives + rituals. Broken down, all religions have a conception of a primary religious experience - an altered state where the individual communes with a higher being ("God"). In some religions, everyone experiences (or aims to experience) the primary religious experience (i.e. "enlightenment") while in other religions, there are a handful of enlightened people who have a direct channel to the higher being and you must speak through them. Religions also have scriptures or stories that are collectively understood and passed down in the form of text or stories. These typically include the religion's ideas about live and death, moral norms, ways to live life, and methods of relating to the primary religious experience. Embedded in this component is the assumption that religion is not the same as individual spirituality because it involves community and collectively understood conceptions. Finally, religions have shared rituals and traditions that are shared by all participants. These help solidify the narratives and form the foundation for how the individual interacts with the primary religious experience. Rituals and traditions also glue the community together. Of course, the "culture" of religions comes from the combination of rituals and narratives all in relation to primary religious experiences. As i was reading New Scientist this morning, i ran across a scientific article about the values of religion in terms of health (written by none other than Robin Dunbar, the gossip/grooming guy who is connected to the 150 number). It made me wonder about the term "religion" in academic analyses - what definition are people using? What constitutes a religion? What doesn't? What about in everyday language? This is a term that we throw around all the time, mostly as a way to debase others' practices. Could American TV worship really be conceptualized as religion? Baroo? Anyhow... that's my thought for the weekend. What other definitions of religion do y'all use? Category: social observations Tags: religion
Posted by zephoria at 3:31 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0) a funny dodgeball moment
While Dodgeball has certainly been useful in social settings, this was the first time i had the opportunity to see it be useful beyond just the basic bar hopping scenario. It reminded me of a time when two friends realized they were in an airport together because they saw each other's music on iTunes. I think that funny points of synchronicity is only going to get more interesting as technology become mores infused into society. Category: social software Tags: dodgeball
Posted by zephoria at 11:20 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) |
Last night, a friend told me about a kid who had his dissertation censored by their school. I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what on earth one could write that would get censored and failed. So i responded with puzzlement and i was told that he had written an entire chapter on how his department's drama had detrimental effects on his research (this was part of the methods section). Needless to say, this did not go over well. 
When i first heard of Blizzard conflating advertising queer-friendly guilds with sexual harassment, i was pretty upset and 
