social network sites and belonging for young 'at risk' Australians

Yfoundations (peak body for youth homelessness in Australia) have published an essay I wrote for them as a blog. Not 100% suitable as a blog post (was written as an essay for their old journal), but the argument is the same.

young people, space and conventions

Have a look at this little champion (iTr3vor) letting loose in an Apple store to a bit of Gaga.

Aside from his moves, what I find most interesting here is how the other people in the space pay very little attention to him. Does his youth allow him to transgress the conventions of a social space like this? (Or, would he be asked to leave if he was a bit older?) Or is the Apple store itself imbued with a different kind of social convention that allows for this kind of disturbance? (If this performance took place in another shop, would it have been allowed?) Or is it that this performance is directed at a screen and thus (presumably) intended for an audience other than those physically present that this kind of disturbance is permitted and, in some ways, ignored?

into the fray: orientation + erotics

Alright! So tomorrow is the beginning of orientation week, which will be particularly busy for me as this year I'll be serving as the first year advisor for my School, helping all the firsties settle in and transition to the big U. This year will also be my first year as a full time member of staff, convening two courses, along with being the year I'm planning to submit my thesis. So... no biggie, right? I'm actually looking forward to 2011. I'm up for a challenge, so let's see what happens.

This week I also dropped in on the Erotics conference hosted by my research centre, the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research. It was a great few days filled with some excellent scholarship, a bit of fun and some new friends. Jack Halberstam's keynote on 'Going Gaga' was an absolute standout. Longest applause following a conference presentation I've ever seen. I've found myself recounting some of the arguments at parties and in conversations since then. There is an echo of it in this review, but damn: I wish I had recorded it!

The conference was seamless. Well done to my mate and idol, Jodie Taylor, who convened with a sharp sense of style and humour that only she is able to reproduce with what appears to be such little effort. Amongst many others, Fiona Patten from the Australian Sex Party was there, along with the delightful Alan McKee who reminded us of the importance of happy endings. On that note, adieu!

Alan McKee

i've got a website!

...like, a real one. With my own domain name: bradyrobards.com. Eventually I want to incorporate my blog and this site, but I think I'll keep this 'candidature blog' separate for now. Also, building a blog into a website (probably using Wordpress, or something?) would require some time and effort, both of which are in short supply at the moment.

Thesis update: blerg.

Creative Communities 2: Day 2 & 3

The final two days of CC2 were as inspiring as the first. Mary Fogarty kicked us off on Wednesday, day 2, with a very accessible and thoughtful keynote on her doctoral research concerned with breaking. Mary brought together much of the thinking from the previous day, suggesting 'extended families' in various youth cultures as useful mechanisms for inclusion and community.

Mary Fogarty, getting down low

Creative Communities 2: Day 1

This week the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research hosted the second annual Creative Communities conference on the Gold Coast at Crowne Plaza. The theme of the conference this year is 'Culture, Identity & Inclusion'. Here are some thoughts and responses to Day 1 of the conference.

organising journal articles

Being organised is my main coping mechanism for pretty much anything related to work: labeled folders (physical and digital), class lists, marks spreadsheets, project timelines, budget documents, agendas for meetings, to-do lists, checklists, synchronising all my files across all my computers/laptop/ipad via dropbox, and knowing exactly where every powerpoint/lecture/seminar/conference paper I have ever prepared for is located. Sometimes I wonder whether or not being excessively organised (at work only, I might add) is actually a form of procrastination. Okay, I don't wonder, I know. Let's not speak of this again.

I don't know whether other people are as fussy me, but it works. Just don't mess with my spreadsheets. In this post I will rave on about one of my favourite things to catalogue and organise: journal articles.

posgraduate symposim

Following on from the success of our Postgraduate Symposium last year, we're repeating the event this year. Essentially it's a full day, funded event where postgrads can present whatever they're working on in a friendly and open environment. Last year we had a few first-time presenters which was great, and quite a few people used the platform to test out some ideas they were planning on presenting at a bigger conference.

Many thanks to the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research (GGRS) for funding, and to my fellow organising committee members for all their hard work: Anne Ferguson, Raphael Nowak, Shanene Ditton, Adele Pavlidis, Haya Cohen, Christopher Driver, Patrick Mitchell and Dr Sarah Baker (our academic rep.). Hopefully it'll be a great event! While it's only aimed at local (Griffith) postgrads at this stage, if anyone else would like to come along please let me know!

Call for Papers

‘Mediated: Identity, Subjectivity & Creativity’

‘In the case of identity, as in other cases, the catchword of modernity was creation; the catchword of postmodernity is recycling’ 

(Bauman 1996: 18).

The Griffith Centre for Cultural Research (GCCR) is hosting Griffith’s second annual Cultural Research RHD Symposium, organised by postgraduates for postgraduates. The full-day symposium will include multiple themed sessions where students will present papers-in-progress and a keynote presentation from Professor Graeme Turner, a leading figure in the development of cultural and media studies in Australia. Amongst other responsibilities, Graeme Turner is a professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies and is the President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

There is no cost associated with attending. We are inviting RHD students attached to the GCCR or the School of Humanities, along with invited external participants, to submit abstracts for consideration in the program. The event is also open to interested staff and students. The theme for the symposium will be ‘Mediated: Identity, Subjectivity & Creativity’. We are seeking papers on a wide range of topics from students in various disciplines: from sociologists to creative arts practitioners; from writers to historians. We seek to offer an open and inclusive academic space for emerging scholars to share and develop their work, contributing to a broader discussion on contemporary negotiations with subjectivity, identity and creativity.

Date:                  Thursday, November 4, 2010

Location:           Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus

Cost:                  Nil

Keynote:            Prof. Graeme Turner

Lunch:               Provided

Dinner:              At delegate’s expense

Abstracts are due September 24 and should not exceed 200 words.  Abstracts should be emailed to Brady Robards (b.robards@griffith.edu.au) in a standard .doc or PDF format.  Successful contributors will be notified via return email by October 8.  All staff and students interested in attending the symposium (open to Honours, Masters and PhD students) are invited to register their interest by September 24 with Brady at the above address.


[Link]

scams and spams: they're coming through the portals!

I realise I'm coming pretty late to this meme-party, but I just saw this cute little 'hacker retrospective lol' on news.com.au and I couldn't resist. Adieu!

"Where can I plug my modem in?!" The Net (1995)

revisitations

I'm working on a piece of writing at the moment that is straying into some territory that I dealt with in my honours dissertation, what seems like an age ago (2007). So, I decided to pull the old beast out and see if any of it might translate over. And then I calmly put it back into the filing cabinet drawer and locked it away, hopefully never to be seen or heard from again.

I know lots of people have this experience with old writing (or any kind of work, perhaps..) especially as students or people still learning their craft. I had a similar kind of experience when I discovered some old first-year essays while helping my parents to move a few months ago, but that was slightly different. That was more nostalgic. My run-in with the honours dissertation could be more aptly described as horrific. It read like I was a Neanderthal belting around in a dark cave looking for a light switch. The continuity between paragraphs was atrocious, my expression was 'experimental' at best and the literature I was engaging with looks like it was just whatever was laying around at the time.

I think partly I have improved slightly, but it's also partly about the way my style has developed I suppose. As in, I'm getting close to actually working out what my style of writing and my approach to research might be. And that stuff in the honours dissertation is not it! I wonder if I'll look back on my PhD thesis in five or ten years time and be similarly horrified? The scary part is that as I send stuff out into the inter-nether, I won't be able to just lock it away in the filing cabinet if (read: when) I turn around and don't like it anymore. Also, how long does the 'Oh I was young and foolish!' thing work for?

[Actual depiction of honours dissertation- stock from mjranum]

diaspora: leave fb day

Amidst growing concerns over privacy on Facebook (does that sound like the intro to a news story or what?!) people all over the shop are heading for the hills! (See what I did there: switched it up with ridiculous expressions, keeping it real, taking it to the next level..) So, leave Facebook day is May 21. Read more about it on Tama Leaver's blog, which is, incidentally, pretty much a one-stop-shop for new media news for me lately. If you haven't already, I'd suggest subscribing. Essentially, this is about awareness raising. Remember when petrol prices sky-rocketed a few years back (they had to upgrade the signs to support surpassing the $1 point) and there was that 'nobody buy petrol on this one particular day' initiative? I think it was meant to scare the oil companies, but I'm pretty sure it didn't work. Fuel was $1.33 on my way to work this morning. Similarly, I don't think leave Facebook day will cause Facebook to collapse or for Mark Zuckerberg to denounce his privacy is dead rhetoric, but this initiative is about discourse building. It's about letting people know that the way we think about privacy is changing right now, and our actions (or complacency) will shape privacy policies of tomorrow. Of course this is part of a much larger shift in privacy concerns, but that's for another discussion.

So: May 21. Will you be leaving Facebook in a privacy-fueled rage? Or will you quietly deactivate your account for a day, and then race back to it at midnight to see if you've missed anything? I'm going to play the social scientist card and observe with pen and pad, although I do enjoy flirting with the 'deactivate my account' button. If you haven't already, you should click it and find out who Facebook thinks will miss you the most, complete with a cute picture of you and said Friend!

This might be a long-term alternative: diaspora. User-controlled, open-source, privacy-aware, node-centric alternative to Facebook. Ready for exodus? Maybe not yet. It's a new project, with some great potential. It's certainly something I'll be following over the next six months or so!

raunchy teachers: friendship vs. journalism

This is great. Jonathan Holmes from Media Watch takes some sloppy/unethical journalism to task. Essentially, some teachers copped some flak for posting 'risqué' photos of themselves on Facebook and their 'friends/Friends' who happened to be journos saw them and ran a story on them. The teachers took the standard measures to ensure their privacy, but there's no accounting for Friends, eh?

Two morals for the price of one story: 1) what happens at band camp and then gets posted on Facebook does not stay at band camp; and 2) be careful who you Friend! They'll trawl your profile and send your party pics into the newspaper.

we're living in the good old days

This article, '5 reasons the internet could die at any moment' got me thinking. The research I'm doing now is so anchored to a particular context and a particular period of time in 'internet history' (the social network site boom) that I often feel like I've got the blinkers on. I'm sure this is symptomatic of PhD projects in general, of course - the whole thing is often about narrowing down and maintaining a focus. Despite all this, one of the things I get asked about most often is 'where to next' for social network sites and the internet in general. It's such a good question (once you get beyond the crystal ball jokes) and my answers are always so vague!

I think it's important not to get too bogged down in the pessimism. Yes, Facebook is surely trawling our data for little (read: vast sets of) gems to sell to marketing agencies, and sure, concerns over privacy are going to continue to be central in our discussions of these spaces. At the same time though, let's not lose sight of the great potential we're in the process of realising here: our ability to (re)connect, to share, to laugh at each other and to make our weird, fascinating little lives quite visible. This has always been the gift of the internet, but only in the last five years or so have so many people had the access. While discourses about an obligation to remain connected and always online will certainly persist, my hope is that with time people will be able to fine-tune their management of social media. I have a friend at the moment, for instance, that is on a 'media diet'. This entails only checking Facebook once a week, and trying to limit checking her email to twice a day - at 9AM and 4PM. I think strategies like this are neat, but I'm also conscious of the fact that for some its an unrealistic exercise. I for one lack that kind of discipline. There's a more organic and gradual alternative, I think, that most people I speak to seem to be finding. I'm also optimistic that new forms of online sociality will continue to appear and disappear, and make a come-back and then be shut down.. and then made into a movie. Remember MySpace? Ah, those were the days. Some of my recent interviewees are still on MySpace, by the way! It's very hip with the younger kids: 15 and 16 year-olds, especially. I'm writing a paper about this at the moment, actually: something along the lines of 'MySpace is for kids and Facebook is for adults: rites of passage in digital participation'. Tentative title!

Anyway, I was talking about this stuff with my first-years last week and I thought it was great when someone said something along the lines of 'I remember the days when I used to get texts from people, now I have to use Facebook! What ever happened to the old days of texting?!' Ah, those were the days. I can't wait to get to the point where we look back on Facebook as that tranquil, golden period in our lives where the pace was slower and the world seemed like a less threatening place.

thefacebook

via woodlandcreature:

Remember when Facebook was called Thefacebook and looked like this? I can’t believe I’ve been on it for almost six years, since summer 2004.

(via mknell : arig)

So there you go. When people call it 'the facebook', they're not being out-of-touch and ridiculous, they're just being retro.

chatroulette: show me your books

ChatRoulette was launched at the end of 2009 (Nov.) and has in a few short months emerged into mainstream discourse. The idea is simple and certainly not new, but it's one that had kind of fallen out of fashion over the last few years: chatting with strangers! The site pairs random individuals from all over the shop and lets them peer into each-other's lives through the webcam window. With the proliferation of social network sites, we've observed a pretty strong tendency emerge whereby people are spending most of their social time online with people they already know -- not strangers. So if ChatRoulette continues to grow, this will mark a nice little shift back to (semi)anonymous chatting with strangers. Although, having said that, the kind of 'chatting' that actually goes on here is debatable. There's no way to pre-select who you'll end up with (it's a gamble, hence the name) so you might end up with some guy rubbing his pants or a bird in a cage or a kid dressed as a stormtrooper or a drunk Polish girl or a whole swathe of regular, inquisitive people. There are lots of funny examples that have been screen-captured (see chatroulettetrolling.com, for instance -- NSFW).

Anyway, a few weeks ago the local newspaper called me up to interview me about this new interwebz phenomenon, and I sheepishly admitted to never having used it. The interview continued for half an hour or so (slow news week, I guess?) and we'll find out soon what the results are. The reason I didn't abandon the interview from the get go was because I think it's important for public discourse to start off on the right foot here. This site is going to attract a whole lot of really negative media attention very quickly, so before the moral panic takes hold completely I thought I'd have a crack at constructing this site in context. So, in the name of research, myself and an esteemed colleague of mine went about exploring this strange and wonderful world we live in armed only with cheap beer, rum and poor lighting.

Our findings? Yes, there are creeps and weirdos out there, but you'll encounter them wherever you go. Unlike IRL, ChatRoulette allows you to 'Next' people (spin the wheel again and get a new partner) quite frequently. In fact, most of the encounters we had lasted only a few seconds. We waved, they waved, we got nexted. Are we not pretty enough for your interwebz?! Here's a nice little doco that sums things up pretty neatly. No no, it's not personal. After a while we got used to nexting people pretty regularly too. We discovered quite a few creeps, but also had some really great discussions with people from all over the place. We taught this Chinese guy some tricks and he told us a bit about where he lives, what he's studying (Fine Art) and we talked about the differences between our lives. It was kind of cool!

There are quite a few other instances of people doing interesting and funny stuff with the site, such as the piano guy. I'm sure we'll see these proliferate. Hopefully the site won't get commercial or change too much for a while. I'm looking forward to seeing whether or not it continues to build.

I'm really enjoying danah boyd's comments about the site (see a full copy of her SXSW keynote here). I know I'm a big boyd fanboy, but she makes too much sense! This site might be just a fad, but it reminds us about the fantastic potential of the internet to make visible the great and quirky and diverse and sometimes-cringe-worthy, sometimes-laugh-worthy world we live in. Lame? Maybe. I'll enjoy my optimistic youth for a little longer yet if that's ok.

To return to the title of this post, here is a link she shared on twitter recently: show us your books! Love it. Adieu!

google-opoly

A week without Google. How would you fare? This class was given what seems to be a fairly straight-forward and easy task. Don't use Google or any of its products (Gmail, Google Maps, Blogger, YouTube..) for a week. Just one week. See the comments on the linked page to see what happened!

This is a great example of how a corporate infrastructure can become embedded in our lives to the point of reflex. This isn't just 'oh I feel hungry and can't be bothered cooking, let's go to McDonalds..' this is 'Google is actually replacing my brain'. I'm strangely not that terrified by the prospect, although that in itself terrifies me. Weird, right? Anyway, I'm going to a masterclass with Geert Lovink for the next two days, so I'll record some reflections on the discussions that emerge out of that here. I'm just reading his article 'The society of the query and the Googlization of our lives', so I'm sure the above experiment might have some resonance there.

apt excursion

While I was digging around in the archives at the State Library, Chris and I popped into the GoMA to check out the APT. It was amazing! Selected favourites below.

archival research

Yesterday I went to the State Library to do some research for a supervisor of mine. It involved archival digging with the micro-film machine. This was one of the first gems I found. It was from a newspaper from 1888 called Southern Queensland Bulletin:

I managed to find a few references to the research topic I was employed to investigate, although compared to the way research is conducted now with computers (and the advent of instant 'searchability') this kind of research initially seemed so tedious. After a few hours of sifting, though, I came to realise the vast potential of this kind of research for uncovering such a broad array of data. It reminded me of why my research is qualitative. In sitting down and 'chatting' about something, or sifting through years of really old papers, you can discover things that a direct question (or a Likert scale) or a google search string won't. And those little bits you discover at the periphery might be crucial. 

I was also reminded that the social ills that seem to plague us according to popular discourse (well, my mother watches A Current Affair and Today Tonight, so...) have, in fact, been plaguing us for quite some time. The form of these ills (and I'd dispute whether they are actually ills at all, in fact) have certainly changed, and the mediums by which they're transmitted are certainly recent inventions, but they're still the same in many ways.