post-marking euphoria

Ahh, the sweet, sweet feeling you get when you reach the bottom of a particularly dastardly pile of marking. This pile consisted of 80 first-year pieces that were between 1500 and 3500 words long, and I'm thoroughly chuffed to see the last of them. There were some great ones, and some.. didn't exactly meet the criteria. However, I'm not going to rant about punctuation or line-spacing or how to spell my name. Instead, I will bask in this post-marking euphoria, quietly forgetting that the next two piles already await me. For now though, I live on to assess another day, and my faithful red pen (who I have named The Avenger) can have a short rest.

(This isn't actually The Avenger, but it's an approximation.. Stock from Glenn)

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!

digital narratives

My first-years finished their first major piece of assessment this week. The task was to create a 'digital narrative' in groups that tells the story of transition to University. This is the third year I've taught this course, so I've seen quite a few of these now, but I still think it's a great assignment that the students seem to engage with. It gets them to think critically about why they're at Uni, but it also gives them a platform to contribute. Here are a couple of really creative ones that take pretty novel approaches. If you want to see more, just type 'Youth & Society Digital Narrative' into YouTube. 

And yes, lots of technical errors/timing issues in this one, but it's still neat! (Inner nerd bias?!)

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.

call for papers: continuum

Conventionally speaking, the study of youth cultures and their associated practices has been focused around the notion of the youth cultural group as a locally situated, physical entity. In recent years, however, research has pointed to the impact of digital media technologies on young people, their cultural practices and forms of interaction. In particular, it has been noted how more recently introduced communication technologies, notably the internet and the mobile phone, have opened up new, often ‘virtual’ spheres of interaction between young people. This in turn begs new questions about the nature of youth culture in the early 21st century. This special edition of Continuum will consider the impact of new communication technologies on youth culture and the way the latter have altered and enhanced the forms of interaction underpinning youth cultural practice.

Papers are being sought in the following areas:

• Mediated youth identities
• Engagement with online social spaces (social network(ing) sites, online games and other virtual environments)
• Youth engagement with peer-to-peer file sharing
• ‘Trans-local’ youth cultural formations 
• Access to sport and extreme sport (Roller Derby, breakdancing, martial-arts, etc.)
• Risk-taking behaviour (chemical cultures, piracy, etc.)

Abstracts of approximately 300 words should be submitted to b.robards at griffith.edu.au no later than 14th May 2010. Authors are invited to contact Andy Bennett (a.bennett at griffith.edu.au) to discuss their approach in advance of submitting abstracts. Successful authors will be asked to submit a full paper, which will be subject to a blind refereeing process.

Please feel free to distribute widely! A PDF version of this CFP can be found here.

quaint

“One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real.” -- William Gibson in Jefferson Hack, via wearethedigitalkids, via something changed.

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!

fb bigger than google in U.S. this week

Egads! I hadn't really thought about this possibility before, but Facebook pipped Google at the post this week in the States. Things can only go downhill from here, right?