apophenia :: academic

March 27, 2008

"From MySpace to Hip Hop: New Media In the Everyday Lives of Youth" public forum

For the last three years, I've been a part of a digital youth research team. This team is funded by the MacArthur Foundation and consists of scholars at both Berkeley and USC (PIs: Peter Lyman, Mimi Ito, Michael Carter, Barrie Thorne). We've been doing large-scale ethnographic studies of U.S. youth, collectively examining different aspects of their lives. The project is almost over and we're all in the process of writing up our findings. We've decided to put together a big public forum event in the Bay Area both to celebrate and showcase what we have found. This event is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required because of limited space. Register! Come!

....

From MySpace to Hip Hop: New Media In the Everyday Lives of Youth

What: A public forum on how digital technologies and new media are changing the way that young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life.

When: Wednesday April 23rd, 2008
Registration: 4.30pm
Panel Discussion: 5-7PM
Reception: 7.30-8.15PM

Where: Hewlett Teaching Center, Building 200, Stanford University, 370 Serra Mall

Register at CommonSense Media. Registration is free, open to the public, but the space is limited. Registration closes April 18th or when the space is full.

Registration Presentations:

• danah boyd - "Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics"
  
• Heather Horst - "Understanding New Media in the Home"
  
• Dilan Mahendran - "Hip Hop Music and Meaning in the Digital Age"
  
• Mimi Ito - "New Media From A Youth Perspective"
  

(More program information here)

Register Now at Common Sense Media or call the reservation line at 1-415-553-6735

If you can not attend this event in person, we will also be streaming it live to the web.

Category: academic

Tags: research presentation

   

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March 10, 2008

curing the ills of sociology

I was reading some background bits on Erving Goffman when I came across this passage, commenting on the state of sociology. Having sat through painful discussions of "what is an information school?" and been grilled about my own disciplinary affiliations, I read this and burst out laughing. I always love reading scholars' takes on disciplinary squabbles, especially when they can step back and see the absurdity in it all. I figured the academics who read my blog might get a kick out of this too.

"I have no universal cure for the ills of sociology. A multitude of myopias limit the glimpse we get of our subject matter. To define one source of blindness and bias as central is engagingly optimistic. Whatever our substantive focus and whatever our methodological persuasion, all we can do I believe is to keep faith with the spirit of natural science, and lurch along, seriously kidding ourselves that our rut has a forward direction. We have not been given the credence and weight that economists lately have acquired, but we can almost match them when it comes to the failure of rigorously calculated predictions. Certainly our systematic theories are every bit as vacuous as theirs: we manage to ignore almost as many critical variables as they do. We do not have the esprit that anthropologists have, but our subject matter at least has not been obliterated by the spread of the world economy. So we have an undiminished opportunity to overlook the relevant facts with our very own eyes. We can't get graduate students who score as high as those who go into Psychology, and at its best the training the latter get seems more professional and more thorough than what we provide. So we haven't managed to produce in our students the high level of trained incompetence that psychologists have achieved in theirs, although, God knows, we're working on it."

-- Erving Goffman in "The Interaction Order" (1983) reproduced in The Goffman Reader (p. xvii)

Category: academic

Tags: sociology disciplines

   

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February 25, 2008

Where HCI comes from (and where it might go)

I've been doing a lot of thinking about HCI (human-computer interaction) and my relationship to that field. I've been kinda frustrated with HCI. The name HCI implies that the field is about people's relationship with machines and the interaction paradigms and designs that enable more efficient or enjoyable connections between the two. Many argue that this is the crux of my research. I've been resistant to this because I believe that I study human-human interaction that happens to have a mediated component to it.

This week, a new book appeared in my mailbox: HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community (eds. Thomas Erickson and David McDonald). This book helped remind me that human-human interaction was part of HCI, even if the field seems not to emphasize that these days.

This book gave me all sorts of smiles. First, I'm a sucker for books of essays where I know half of the authors and drool with respect over the other half. Second, I love books that trace histories that I read long ago while offering fresh perspective and new contextualization. Third, I like books that challenge me to rethink my position on something. Through the perspective of contemporary HCI scholars, this book examines some of the core literature that is at the foundation of HCI and reflects on its relevance today. In walking down this memory lane, I was reminded of the many facets of HCI. There's the HCI that's about interfaces. There's the HCI that's about development processes, foundational to contemporary industry practice. There's the HCI that's about taking computation into the wild while also making it ubiquitous or invisible. There's the HCI that's about supporting collaboration and groups. All of these HCIs are in the history of HCI and it's fun to read these eminent and emergent scholars reflect on the work done in all of these areas. This book made me long for the days when I felt like HCI was my home because it highlights a history that is still relevant to me. (Of course, some of what they discuss - Everett Rogers and Jane Jacobs, for example - goes beyond HCI.)

While this book has unbelievable breadth, my frustration with contemporary HCI often stems from my feeling that it has narrowed its focus over the years. While experimental psychology has been fully embraced by the field, many HCI scholars reject qualitative social science as irrelevant to HCI. There are plenty who embrace it, but the experimental psych approach dominates the conversations and work that does not follow the normative formula tends to not get published. Personally, I'm wary of most publications that make broad claims based on user studies with n=6 CS grad students. (While there are sound reasons for this methodology in certain subfields of psych, most of how it gets executed in HCI scholarship makes my toes curl.) As HCI tries to become a field in its own right, I feel increasingly alienated by it. I stopped going to CHI a few years ago because it no longer felt like my home (and the cost was way prohibitive). I stopped reviewing this year because I felt as though my criticisms were with the methodological approach of the field and thus I was doing a disservice to CHI.

Yet, HCI and its sister CSCW really were the beginnings of thinking about how people communicate in computer-mediated environments and it's nice to see that history recounted. It's nice to be reminded that qualitative work really was valued. Much of that seems to have been forgotten in an era of scholarship that requires user tests and design implications to be considered valid. What happened to work that focused on the interaction between humans and computers in the wild? Personally, I love work that analyzes how mega collective action by inhabitants of a system result in behaviors never predicted by the designers. This, unfortunately, doesn't fit neatly into the build/test/explain cycle that dominates the field; thus, it tends to get published elsewhere. I hear things are changing and HCI is evolving in new ways, especially now that iSchools are starting to engage with the topic. Perhaps this book will remind more folks where HCI came from and open new doors for where it might go.

Category: academic

Tags: HCI CSCW scholarship book

   

Posted by zephoria at 8:18 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

February 6, 2008

open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals

On one hand, I'm excited to announce that my article "Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence" has been published in Convergence 14(1) (special issue edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze). On the other hand, I'm deeply depressed because I know that most of you will never read it. It is not because you aren't interested (although many of you might not be), but because Sage is one of those archaic academic publishers who had decided to lock down its authors and their content behind heavy iron walls. Even if you read an early draft of my article in essay form, you'll probably never get to read the cleaned up version. Nor will you get to see the cool articles on alternate reality gaming, crowd-sourcing, convergent mobile media, and video game modding that are also in this issue. That's super depressing. I agreed to publish my piece at Sage for complicated reasons, but...

I vow that this is the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get access. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I'd like to ask other academics to do the same.

For those outside of the academy, here's a simplistic account of academic publishing. Academics publish articles in journals. Journals are valued by academic disciplines based on their perceived quality. To be successful (and achieve tenure), academics must publish in the journals that are valued in their discipline. Journals are published by academic publishers. Academics volunteer their time to peer review articles in these journals. Editors consider the reviews and decide which are to be published, which should be sent back to be revised and resubmitted, and which are to be rejected. For the most part, editors are unpaid volunteers (although some do get a stipend). Depending on the journal, the article is then sent to a professional copyeditor who is paid (but not all journals have copyeditors). Academic publishers then print the journal, sending it to all of its subscribers. Most subscribers are university libraries, but some individuals also subscribe. (To give you a sense of the economics, Convergence costs individuals $112 and institutions $515 for 4 issues a year.) Academic libraries also subscribe to the online version of the journals, but I don't know how much that costs. Those who don't have access to an academic library can pay to access these articles (a single article in Convergence can be purchased DRM-ified for one day at $15).

The economy around academic journals is crumbling. Libraries are running out of space to put the physical copies and money to subscribe to journals that are read by few so they make hard choices. Most academics cannot afford to buy the journal articles, either in print or as single copies so they rely on library access. The underground economy of articles is making another dent into the picture as scholars swap articles on the black market. "I'll give you Jenkins if you give me Ito." No one else is buying the journals because they are god-awful expensive and no one outside of a niche market knows what's in them. To cope, most academic publishers are going psycho conservative. Digital copies of the articles have intense DRM protection, often with expiration dates and restrictions on saving/copying/printing. Authors must sign contracts vowing not to put the articles or even drafts online. (Sage embargoes all articles, allowing authors to post pre-prints on their site one year following publication, but not before.) Academic publishers try to restrict you from making copies for colleagues, let alone for classroom use.

I should probably be sympathetic to academic publishers. They are getting their lunch eaten and the lack of consistent revenue from journals makes it much harder for them to risk publishing academic books and they are panicked. Yet, frankly, I'm not humored. Producing a journal article is a lot of labor for scholars too. Editing a journal is a lot of labor for scholars too. In most cases, they do this for free. Academic publishers expect authors to do both for free because that's how they achieve status. At the same time, they are for-profit entities that profit off of all of the free labor by academics. Some might argue that academics are paid by universities and this external labor is part of their university job. Perhaps, but then why should others be profiting off of it? Why not instead publish with open-access online-only journals produced as labors of love by communities of volunteer scholars (i.e. many open-access journals)? Oh, right. Because those aren't the "respectable" journals because they don't have a reputation or a history (of capitalizing off of the labor of academics). The result? Academics are publishing to increasingly narrow audiences who will never read their material purely so that they can get the right credentials to keep their job. This is downright asinine. If scholars are publishing for audiences of zero, no wonder no one respects them.

I think that this needs to change. The traditional model of journal publishing makes sense in an era where the only mechanism of distribution was paper. Paper publishing and distribution is expensive, and I'm not trying to dismiss this. Yet, in a digital era, the structures of publishing and distribution have changed; the costs have changed too. Open-access, online-only journals have four key costs: bandwidth, copyediting, marketing, and staffing costs. The latter is often irrelevant in fields where editors volunteer. It's not clear that marketing is necessary or cannot be done for free. There are all sorts of possible funding models for bandwidth. This leaves copyediting.

I'd be sad to see some of the academic publishers go, but if they can't evolve to figure out new market options, I have no interest in supporting their silencing practices. I think that scholars have a responsibility to make their work available as a public good. I believe that scholars should be valued for publishing influential material that can be consumed by anyone who might find it relevant to their interests. I believe that the product of our labor should be a public good. I do not believe that scholars should be encouraged to follow stupid rules for the sake of maintaining norms. Given that we do the bulk of the labor behind journals, I think that we can do it without academic publishers (provided that we can find hosting and copyediting).

Here's what I'd like to propose:

• Tenured Faculty and Industry Scholars: Publish only in open-access journals. Unlike younger scholars, you don't need the status markers because you're tenured or in industry. Use that privilege to help build new journals that are not strapped to broken business models. Help build the reputations of new endeavors so that they can be viable publishing venues for future scholars. Publish in open-access journals, build a personal webpage and add your article there. You will get much more visibility, especially from younger scholars who turn to Google before they go to the library. I understand that a lot of you prefer to flout the rules of these journals and publish your articles on your website anyhow, even when you're not allowed. The problem is that you're not helping change the system for future generations.
• Disciplinary associations: Help open-access journals gain traction. Encourage your members to publish in them. Run competitions for best open-access publications and have senior scholars write committee letters for younger scholars whose articles are stupendous but published in non-traditional venues.
• Tenure committees: Recognize alternate venues and help the universities follow. Younger scholars can't afford to publish in alternate venues until you begin recognizing the value of these publications. Help that process along and encourage your schools to do the same.
• Young punk scholars: Publish only in open-access journals in protest, especially if you're in a new field. This may cost you advancement or tenure, but you know it's the right thing to do. If you're an interdisciplinary scholar or in a new field, there aren't "respected" journals in your space and so you're going to have to defend yourself anyhow. You might as well use this opportunity to make the valued journals the open-access ones.
• More conservative young scholars: publish what you need to get tenure and then stop publishing in closed venues immediately upon acquiring tenure. I understand why you feel the need to follow the rules. This is fine, but make a point by stopping this practice the moment you don't need it.
• All scholars: Go out of your way to cite articles from open-access journals. One of the best ways for a journal to build its reputation is for its articles to be cited broadly. Read open-access journals and cite them. Oh, and while you're at it, if you have a choice between citing a living author and a dead one, support the living one. The young scholar at Santa Cruz who's extending Durkheim's argument needs the cite more than Durkheim. Don't forget that citations have politics and you can vote for the future with your choice of citations.
• All scholars: Start reviewing for open-access journals. Help make them respected. Guest edit to increase the quality. Build their reputations through your involvement. Make these your priority so that the closed journals are the ones struggling to get quality reviewers.
• Libraries: Begin subscribing to open-access journals and adding them to your catalogue. Many of you do this, but not all. Open-access journals are free. Adding them to databases does costs money but it helps scholarship and will help you ween off of expensive journals in the long run.
• Universities: Support your faculty in creating open-access journals on your domains. You are respected institutions. The bandwidth cost of hosting a journal would be much less than allowing your undergrads access YouTube. Support your faculty in creating university-branded journals and work with them to run conferences and do other activities to help build the reputation of such nascent publications. If it goes well, your brand will gain status too.
• Academic publishers: Wake up or get out. Silencing the voices of academics is unacceptable. You're not helping scholarship or scholars. Find a new business model or leave the journal publishing world. You may be making money now, but your profits will not continue to grow using this current approach. Furthermore, I'd bank on academics shunning you within two generations. If you think more than a quarter ahead, you know that it's the right thing to do for business as well as for the future of knowledge.
• Funding agencies: Require your grantees to publish in open-access journals or make a pre-print version available at a centralized source specific to their field. Many academic journals have exceptions for when funding agencies demand transparency. You can help your grantees and the academic world at large by backing their need to publish in an accessible manner. Furthermore, you could fund the publishing of special issues in return for them being open-access or help offset a publisher's costs for a journal so that they can try to go open-access. (Tx Alex)

Making systemic change like this is hard and it will require every invested party to stand up for what they know is right and chip away at the old system. I don't have tenure (and at this rate, no one will ever let me). I am a young punk scholar and I strongly believe that we have a responsibility to stand up for what's right. Open-access is right. Heavy metal gates and expensive gatekeepers isn't. It's time for change to happen! To all of the academics out there, I beg you to help me make this change reality. Let's stop being silenced by academic publishers.

[Why I published with a locked-down journal]

Update on Feb 8: I'm not the only advocate for open-access, nor do I think that all scholars can boycott this form of publishing, but I do think that everyone can take steps to change the future of scholarship for the benefit of everyone. I strongly believe that those who will benefit the most from open-access publishing will be the academics who pour their heart and soul into their research and writing. My apologies to those who think that I am being condescending towards academics; this is not my intention. I just think that we've become too complacent and are perpetuating a system that hurts ourselves while allowing others to profit off of keeping us quiet and invisible.

When it comes to the trafficking of scholarship, much has changed since the journal system was created. There used to be a day when scholars would read everything new that was published in their field, or at least everything published in the top journals. The path to success was to publish in the top journals because it was assumed that everyone in the field would read it. For most fields, this is no longer the case. Young scholars are not indoctrinated into a field by reading every issue of the top journals. They are more likely to search for articles related to their topics of interest than to browse a few top journals. Being present in library catalogues and key databases is critical to visibility. Publishing in the top journals still increases one's likelihood of visibility and citation, but it's more about status now.

Technology changes the status quo. Thanks to increased search, scholars have an easier time finding material relevant to their needs, provided that it is catalogued. Through the cataloguing of citations, it's easier to follow the web of article networks. While we're not entirely there, the options for visibility have changed. This is especially true for interdisciplinary scholars who don't have a home set of journals. The flow of their scholarship looks very different than the flow of traditional fields with a hierarchy of publishing venues. While innovations in search change the information landscape, access is the missing component. And frankly, I think we're moving backwards on this one.

I love academic scholarship; my frustration with academic publishing has to do with equality, access, and the meaning of a public good. One of my critics is correct - this is about transparency and making certain that those who want to engage with scholarship can. I don't think that academics should necessarily be writing for public audiences, but I do think that their work should be publicly accessible.

One of the reasons that I push for open-access journals instead of just letting people put pre-prints online (the publicly accessibly alternative) is because open-access journals are catalogued and search-friendly. It's a lot easier to find articles in open-access than it is to find them scattered across the web. I know there databases that allow people to add their pre-prints, but this is not done automatically and that's why I think that it's less ideal.

There's a lot to be said about top journals. They are published regularly. They are more likely to attract top reviewers and top editors who are careful about what goes into the journal. They have a higher rate of submission, allowing them to be picky. They are more likely to be catalogued by libraries. They infer status at every level and they make it a lot easier to assess the claims made by the scholars. I think that all of this is important and I understand why lots of scholars want to stand by this system. But, I strongly believe that we can have top journals without restraining ourselves to locked-down publication models. I don't think that the two have to go hand-in-hand, but I do acknowledge that moving towards a new system without the support of the traditional academic publishers who profit off of the locked-down model will be extremely bumpy. When I submitted the article that prompted this post, I thought that I could convince Sage that this was the right thing to do. I couldn't. It would be soooo much easier with the help of publishers and part of me still hopes that they'll see the light, but I came to the frustrating conclusion that this is unlikely and that the only path is to route around them. I'm reminded of John Gilmore's quote: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." I see locked-down journals as a form of censorship.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe academic publishers will lead the media industry into a new era. Maybe they'll realize that their business model is outdated and develop new ones. Maybe they'll change their publishing and distribution strategy so as to make open-access viable (especially given that the libraries would love to move away from physical journals and pay-per-print is viable for those who want a bound version). This would make me ecstatic and I would happily volunteer to review for any traditional publisher who decides to go open-access. But I can't stand by and watch another generation of scholarship get locked down. It simply isn't right.

In light of the increased attention this entry has received and some of the confusion people had with what I said, I modified some of the content of this post. I did not edit out the things that people took offense to so that this would stay on public record.

For those interested in pursuing this topic, please read Peter Suber's Six things that researchers need to know about open access. This includes a fantastic collection of links on open-access alternatives. For those of you in the natural sciences, be proud: the The Public Library of Science is a great open-access resource filled with great scholarship.

Category: academic

Tags: publishing tenure scholarship journals

   

Posted by zephoria at 9:36 PM | Comments (74) | TrackBack (0)

January 9, 2008

Suzanne Briet: madame documentation and librarian extraordinaire

This entry goes out to all of the librarians and information school students who read this blog.

One of the best parts of being in an information school is that you get to learn all sorts of things about people who loved information long before there was an economy for it. One of the professors in my school - Michael Buckland - always astonishes me with stories about great information gods and goddesses, many of whom never got credit for their work. His latest book Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine tracks the story of a Jewish inventor who escaped Germany only to have many of his inventions stolen by Americans. Think Vannevar Bush invented the Memex? Think again.

Buckland piqued my interest with another story of brilliant librarian who ignored and forgotten: Suzanne Briet. A feminist, rabble rouser, and historian, Briet was one of the first behind the documentalist movement during the interim period.

"Briet argued that documentalists should be embedded in the cultural contexts of the users that they serve. From this vantage point documentalists can not only retrieve documents, but prospect for information not yet asked for, translate information from other languages, abstract and index documents, and in general, proactively work within the dynamics of the advancement of knowledge in a field.(Day)

Sounds like Google, no?

"Briet's writings stressed the importance of cultural forms and social situations and networks in creating and responding to information needs, rather than seeing information needs as inner psychological events." (Day)

Her writings continue on to anticipate actor-network theory (an approach popular in information schools). She challenged positivist and quantitative notions of "information", attributing a cultural origin and function to documentation and documentary signs ("What is Documentation?").

Brilliant as she was, she was ignored and forgotten. Only one librarian attended her funeral. Most of her writings were ignored and never translated. Even today, few information scholars know about her and fewer teach her contributions. She doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry!

In an attempt to make her work more accessible, Ronald Day, Laurent Martinet, and Hermina Anghelescu have translated her work "What is Documentation?" into English and PDFified it for free download. Together with Buckland, they have also put together a website dedicated to her. Their hope is that more information scholars will learn of her and understand the historical context of documentation culture. Personally, I'm intrigued to learn that a brilliant feminist scholar was so visionary yet so forgotten.

Dearest librarians and fellow information students, Michael Buckland, the rescuer of forgotten librarians, is curious what it will take to truly resuscitate her memory? We live in a world of records and information, yet we often forget the explorers and founders (especially if they were women, people of color, gay, or non-Christian). How do we revive the stories of those whose contributions were ignored?

Category: academic

Tags: librarian information scholar suzannebriet

   

Posted by zephoria at 4:25 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

January 2, 2008

Santa meets the IRB

Since I love the IRB sooooo much, it's not surprising that everyone I know forwarded this message along to me over the holiday season. For all of you out there who dream of writing IRB proposals, this is for you:

Dr. K. Kringle, Adjunct Professor of Child Psychology Far Northern University

Dear Dr. Kringle:

At the regularly scheduled December 24 meeting, the IRB reviewed your protocol, "A Global Observational Study of Behavior in Children." While we believe it has many good features, it could not be approved as submitted. If you choose to revise your study, please address the following concerns:

1. You propose to study "children of all ages". Please provide an exact lower and upper age limit, as well as the precise number of subjects. Provide a statistically valid power calculation to justify this large of a study.

2. Your only inclusion criterion is "belief in Santa Claus." Please provide a copy of the screening questionnaire that determines such a belief. Provide a Waiver of Authorization under HIPAA in order to record these beliefs prior to enrollment in your study. The Board recommends that you obtain a Certificate of Confidentiality as beliefs are sensitive and personal information.

3. You propose to "know when they are sleeping and know when they are awake". How will this be done? Will children undergo video monitoring in their beds? Will they have sleep EEGs? You list 100 elves as research assistants. Are any of them a sleep physiologist?

4. Your primary outcome measure is to "know when they've been bad or good." What standard is being used to determine 'goodness'? Do children have to be good all year or just most of the time? What if they have been really, really, good except for one time when they hit their little brother?

5. You propose to conduct your research by entering the subjects' homes through the chimney. Have you considered the damage to the roof, carpeting, etc., that this will cause? Moreover, children are likely to be startled by your appearance late at night. Please revise your protocol to conduct your home visits between 9 am and 5 pm Monday through Friday with at least one parent being present.

6. You state that compensation for participation will be "sugarplums, candy, and toys" for the good little girls and boys. This may not be appropriate for the children with obesity, dental caries, and hyperactivity. Also, your proposal to leave a lump of coal in the stockings of the bad children will be unfairly stigmatizing to them individually and as a group. In general, the Board suggests a small token of appreciation for all participants. Perhaps a $5 Toys-R-Us gift card would be better.

7. The database of good and bad children will be kept "on a scroll at the North Pole." Please describe the security provisions you have in place to protect the research data. Is the scroll kept in a locked cabinet in a locked room? Who has access to the scroll? Are there backup copies of the scroll and how often are they compared to the original?

8. You mention the participation of "eight tiny reindeer" in your protocol. Please provide the Board with documentation of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee approval.

9. Please provide the Human Subjects Protection training dates for Mrs. Claus and the elves.

10. As this study involves prospective data collection and is more than minimal risk without prospect of direct benefit to the subjects, informed consent signed by both parents will be required. Please have the consent form translated into every language spoken by children.

Please submit 25 copies of your revised protocol to the lRB. The IRB will be on Holiday Season schedule for the next two weeks. If approved, you will be able to conduct your study sometime in January.

Sincerely,
E. Scrooge, MD - Chair, Institutional Review Board

Category: academic

Tags: IRB humansubjects

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 17, 2007

Vodafone Receiver #18

I am happy to share that the folks at Vodafone Receiver decided to mashup some of my blog entries and my AAAS talk for their Issue #18. The piece, called Socializing digitally won't be new to many of you, but i still find it exciting to see a morphed version of my writings. What's even cooler is that it's published alongside some work that i think is uber cool. The other pieces in this issue are:

• Phone Call (interview with The Faint)
• Homecasting – video-sharing as a cultural practice (by José van Dijck)
• Connected strategies for connecting homes (by Mark Newman)
• Keeping things simple (by John Seely Brown)
• Appliances evolve (by Mike Kuniavsky)
• How users take communication technologies home (by Leslie Haddon)
• The new television (by Louise Barkhuus)
• Pleasant, personalized, portable – the future of domotic design (by Fausto Sainz de Salces)

My apologies for everyone for the sound on my piece. This is not my fault. And i agree that it sucks that you can't turn it off. For those with a sound aversion, here's a PDF version of my piece

Category: academic

   

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April 6, 2007

NYC talk April 13 w/ Ethan Zuckerman and Trebor Scholz

I'm coming to New York next week to give a talk at the New School with Ethan Zuckerman and Trebor Scholz. If you're in the area, come! It's a public talk and it should be mighty fun.

...

Democratization and the Networked Public Sphere
* Panel Discussion with danah boyd, Trebor Scholz, and Ethan Zuckerman

Friday, April 13, 2007, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
New York City
Admission: $8, free for all students, New School faculty, staff, and alumni with valid ID

This evening at the Vera List Center for Art & Politics will discuss the potential of sociable media such as weblogs and social networking sites to democratize society through emerging cultures of broad participation.

danah boyd will argue four points. 1) Networked publics are changing the way public life is organized. 2) Our understandings of public/private are being radically altered 3) Participation in public life is critical to the functioning of democracy. 4) We have destroyed youths' access to unmediated public life. Why are we now destroying their access to mediated public life? What consequences does this have for democracy?

Trebor Scholz will present the paradox of affective immaterial labor. Content generated by networked publics was the main reason for the fact that the top ten sites on the World Wide Web accounted for most Internet traffic last year. Community is the commodity, worth billions. The very few get even richer building on the backs of the immaterial labor of very very many. Net publics comment, tag, rank, forward, read, subscribe, re-post, link, moderate, remix, share, collaborate, favorite, write. They flirt, work, play, chat, gossip, discuss, learn and by doing so they gain much: the pleasure of creation, knowledge, micro-fame, a "home," friendships, and dates. They share their life experiences and archive their memories while context-providing businesses get value from their attention, time, and uploaded content. Scholz will argue against this naturalized "factory without walls" and will demand for net publics to control their own contributions.

Ethan Zuckerman will present his work on issues of media and the developing world, especially citizen media, and the technical, legal, speech, and digital divide issues that go alongside it. Starting out with a critique of cyberutopianism, Zuckerman will address citizen media and activism in developing nations, their potential for democratic change, the ways that governments (and sometimes corporations) are pushing back on their ability to democratize.

Category: academic

   

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March 6, 2007

CFP: Public Practices, Social Software: Examining social practices in networked publics

Nicole Ellison, Scott Golder, and i are putting together a workshop for the 3rd Annual Communities and Technologies Conference on Public Practices, Social Software: Examining social practices in networked publics. Below is the basic description:

This full-day workshop proposes to bring together researchers interested in studying social software. We use this term loosely to include social network sites (e.g., Cyworld, MySpace, orkut, and Facebook), contemporary online dating services (e.g., Friendster, Spring Street Personals, Match.com), blogging services (e.g., LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogger), tagging tools (e.g. del.icio.us, Digg) and media sharing sites (e.g., YouTube, Flickr). Although the functionality of these sites differs greatly, there are some common features: a user-generated profile, visible linkages between users, public communication forums (such as message boards or comments), and persistent traces of user behavior.

Although we intend to appeal to broad range of researchers, we expect that we will primarily draw the attention of those studying social network sites. At the same time, we recognize that there is a lot of crossover between social network sites and the broader realm of social software. We are hoping that cross-pollination would be helpful to both. While we are aware of and have access to dozens of researchers interested in social network sites, we are not certain of the number of researchers looking at other forms of social software.

If you are interested, please see the workshop homepage for more information on how to apply. Note: the deadline for workshop proposals is April 23, 2007. The workshop will take place at the C&T conference on June 28, 2007.

Category: academic

   

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February 28, 2007

IRB issues covered by NYTimes

In the New York Times today, there's an article on Institutional Review Boards (the board that handles human subjects issues for academic institutions). I'm definitely amongst the people who constantly bitch about the absurdity of IRBs (even if their intentions are good) and this article discusses my frustration in much more polite terms than i ever could. I'm glad to see this issue being publicized because it's at the core of my existential crisis. I am most likely going to graduate next year. I'm trying to decide whether or not to go on the academic market. Currently, i'm leaning against it purely because i want to get some research done without the limitations and bureaucracy of an IRB. There's a part of me that finds that unbelievably depressing. I wonder how many others slink away from academia or choose not to pursue a particular research question purely because of IRB.

(Tx Irina)

Category: academic

Tags: IRB humansubjects academia

   

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November 27, 2006

announcing two new academic papers

I am pleased to announce that a paper i wrote a while back is part of a cool collection of papers in Reconstruction's Special Issue on Theories/Practice of Blogging (edited by Michael Benton and Lauren Elkin). My piece - "A Blogger's Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium" - argues that blogging needs to be looked at as a practice on top of a medium, not simply a CMC genre.

Not to jump the gun or anything, but another piece of mine will go live next week in First Monday in a special issue on "Identity and Identification in the Networked World" (edited by Tim Schneider and Michael Zimmer). That one, entitled "Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community Into Being on Social Network Sites" examines the Friending practices that are so common in social network sites. I suspect that this piece might be quite valuable to those of you who are looking at MySpace and going why on earth do people have 9000 friends??? Stay tuned on First Monday for that one!

Category: academic

   

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June 2, 2006

academic humor

God i love PhD Comics. Right now, my working dissertation proposal title does have a colon in it. And some fancy buzzwords. Rather than wit, it has a symbol. Of course, it's only a mod of a title i've been using for my MySpace stuff generally which makes me uber lame... ["Why American Youth (heart) MySpace: Identity Production and Digital Publics"]

I don't know if there are other academics reading this, but i'd sooo love to hear your dissertation titles... I sent this comic to a few friends yesterday and it made me giggle to think how stereotypical we all are in our title creations.

Six more days and counting.

Category: academic

Tags: phdcomics dissertation

   

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October 25, 2005

if i had a billion dollars

At a recent glitzy conference, a venture capitalist asked me what company i'd create if he funded me. I thought the question odd but it got me thinking. Lately, i've met a lot of genuinely rich people and a friend of mine pointed out that the only thing you can do with that kind of money is buy a private jet. Gross. So it made me think... what would i create? I know it wouldn't be a tech company...

As a kid, did you ever dream of designing a country? Or a city? Or an island? Well, i did. As i got older, i got more practical. I want to design my own university.

I'm fascinated by university structures. How architecture affects the ways in which people interact and learn, the ways in which collegiate social networks affect long term development of ideas, the ways in which disciplinarity divides, the incentives for teaching and research, the problems with competition for scarce funds, the relationship between formal and informal learning for students, etc.

The problem is that i'm not interested in fixing a broken university - i want to start over. (Yes, i realize the problems with this desire...) But, i want to give people a reason to want to learn, give professors a reason to want to teach/research. I want to create a brand from scratch, truly design a system from the bottom up. Wouldn't that be fun?

Category: academic

Tags: design university

   

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July 15, 2005

politics of breathing

I first noticed my bad breathing habits when i went scuba diving. When everyone was ready to emerge, having depleted their tank of air, i still had half a tank left. I also notice that my reaction to someone disrupting me working on my computer is to take a deep breath. Do i breathe when i'm virtual? I certainly don't remember to eat, pee or blink so i kinda doubt it.

All of this made me absolutely fascinated with Kelly McGonigal's The Politics of Breathing: Still Liberating Women, After All These Years? I wonder if the computer is my contemporary corset....

Category: academic

   

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March 20, 2005

HICSS: Persistent Conversations

HICSS may look like a boondoggle (it is, afterall, in Hawaii) but one of the reasons that i keep applying to it is because the Persistent Conversation track has amazing researchers interested in visualization, social technologies and privacy. The track is meant to bring together people interested in the implications of persistent, archivable, searchable data surrounding communication. What do you do with it? How do you study it?

Anyhow, the abstract deadline is March 31 (abstract - 250 words). If you have research that you need to write up, consider applying to HICSS: Persistent Conversations Minitrack. In addition to good research, there is still a beautiful beach.

Category: academic

   

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March 18, 2005

SIMS career fair

Do you work for a company that is interested in hiring information school students (think: hybrid between tech, social, business) either full-time or for internships. My department is throwing a career fair on April 1. They asked me to suggest companies but i figured it might be useful to ask y'all if you want to hire folks.

For those who don't know, SIMS has a Master's program and a PhD program. The Master's folks tend to be more interested in actually building products and working in tech companies than us pie-in-the-sky PhD folks who just critique the shit out of everything. At the same time, they have a variety of different useful skills - development, business management, ethnography, usability, information organization, etc.

Anyhow, if you want to participate on April 1, let me know and i'll recommend you to my department. This is a low-key event (i.e. folks interacting not scary huge recruitment kiosks) and is particularly useful for Bay Area local companies.

Category: academic

   

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February 27, 2005

Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?

There's nothing like science humor to brighten my day so i was laughing hysterically when a friend read to me from Can a Biologist Fix a Radio? - or, What I Learned while Studying Apoptosis.

How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size. We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, roundshaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we will investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio's performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some people can discern some distortion), this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate...

[Note: said friend sees this article as a call-to-arms, not simply science humor... apparently i'm not as big of a nerd as i think.]

Category: academic

   

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February 25, 2005

Social Software in the Academy Workshop

I am helping organize a workshop on social software in the academy along with Sarah Lohnes. Todd Richmond, Mimi Ito, and Justin Hall. It will take place at USC's Annenberg Center on May 13-14.

We are currently looking for papers, panels and demos on all aspects of how social software affects and reflects academia (deadline: March 31). Please check out the Call for Participation for more information.

Category: academic

   

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April 21, 2004

decrease your erdos number

OK, this ebay auction has me ROFL: Decrease Your Erdos Number! If you're a social networks geek, or a mathematician, physicist or computer scientist, you must check this out. Too funny. And there are even bids!

Update: Now that i've learned a bit more about the history and state of this auction, i thought i'd inform the curious reader of Jonah Peretti's antics, normally called contagious media. Jonah set off a few memes of his own to see how they would spread - the Nike Sweatshop Email and the Rejection Hotline are my favorites.

Category: academic

   

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July 22, 2003

It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age

"It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age" is a paper by Bonnie Nardi, Steve Whittaker and Heinrich Schwarz (circa 2000).

We discuss our ethnographic research on personal social networks in the workplace, arguing that traditional institutional resources are being replaced by resources that workers mine from their own networks. Social networks are key sources of labor and information in a rapidly transforming economy characterized by less institutional stability and fewer reliable corporate resources. The personal social network is fast becoming the only sensible alternative to the traditional "org chart" for many everyday transactions in today's economy.

This is a great paper by very respectable researchers, revealing some of the reasons that there is such motivation to empower individual's use of their social network.

Category: academic

   

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November 6, 2002

TV Addiction is Real

I was visiting a friend this weekend and somehow conversation wandered off into a discussion about TV Addiction and he started rambling off about a Scientific American article that he read back in February. As i was buried in my own research, i never even heard about this little bit flying by. How great is it to finally feel justified in my hatred of the TV for its addictive powers!

Apparently, we are biologically programmed with an orienting response that handles situations that provide a quick change in scenary. This is crucial because when something changes rapidly, we need to focus on it. Blood rushes to the brain to handle the thought processing necessary to react to such stimuli. Unfortunately, it takes upwards of 16 seconds to adjust to such changes in order for blood to leave the brain and stop focusing. Television capitalizes on this because scene-shifting is so common. Thus, we focus on the TV and never let go. Our processes slow down below sleep levels, making us feel even more groggy because we aren't actually metabolizing at a high level. This sudden shift in reduced body processing is what makes us feel initially relaxed by sitting down in front of the TV - everything grinds to a halt. But the result is problematic and we start to feel gross with continued sitting, but are unable to break our gaze away from the addictive box. The initial draw to the TV becomes both a habit and an addiction, as we want that sudden stress relief, regardless of feeling even grosser hours later. Mental note: TV == heroin.

Now i can feel better knowing that i never want a TV in my home.

Keywords for search: Csikszentmihalyi

Category: academic

   

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May 12, 2002

author of "The Lonely Crowd" died

David Riesman, author of the controversial academic/pop culture book The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, passed away. It's an intriguing book, written in the 1950's, at the heart of the suburban American 'togetherness', developing a labeling system for talking about the different types of neighbors and community relationships.... Fun sociology critiques of the American dream (and American neuroses). Given all of Putnam's critiques that seem to long for the 1950's, i wonder if American culture was ever truly functional... ha!

Category: academic

   

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