This morning’s keynote speaker was one of my favorite people, John Willinsky, head of the Public Knowledge Project, which has produced both the Open Journal Systems and the Open Conference Systems, among other projects. Again, problems in the notes below the fold should be attributable to me and my conference headache, not to John.
Yesterday’s keynote was from Henry Jenkins, entitled “The Moral Economy of Web 2.0: Reconsidering the Relations Between Producers and Consumers.” I’m posting my notes below the fold; anything goofy therein should be attributed to flaws in the notetaker rather than the talk.
I sorta dropped the ball on conference blogging yesterday, as I got increasingly caught up in conferencing itself — but I’m going to attempt to catch up on the rest of the day:
The second panel I attended yesterday, just after lunch, was the one I moderated, entitled “youth and play.” I’m not sure that was the best mode of characterizing the collection of papers presented, three of which did have to do with youth, and a fourth of which did have overtly to do with play, after a fashion at least, but those categories aren’t really what tied the papers together. (The fifth presenter did not show, which improved the panel’s operation, in that we actually got to discuss the papers more deeply, but which I would nonetheless mark down as extremely bad form.) If anything, I’d say that issues of trust and identity connected the papers more firmly than the panel’s title terms.
The panel began with a paper from Hebatallah El-Semary on Egyptian children’s uses of the internet, and particularly the relationships they have with their parents around such use: how much do their parents regulate or monitor their internet usage (not much), and how much do children resist their parents’ attempts at filtering such exposure (significantly). The second paper, by Oren Golan, focused on Israeli youths’ negotiations of anonymity, identity construction, and trust in online communities; the issue of how much information about themselves to reveal is a significant one in a small country where the seemingly random person they’re chatting with could turn out to be the brother of their cousin’s best friend. The third paper presented the results of a study, conducted by Stepan Konecy and David Smahel, of Czech adolescents and young adults, investigating how much internet users lie about themselves online, and about what subjects. Finally, Edgar Gomez and Elisenda Ardevol presented their work, conducted with Adolfo Estalella, on what they termed “playful embodiment,” a look at the practices of a number of Mexican and other Latin American bloggers and content creators who construct their online identities not by erasing the body but by calling attention to it, photographing it, writing explicitly about its processes and desires.
The discussion afterward was quite engaging, as the audience teased out the interconnections and differences amongst these papers. The one thing that I didn’t say then — as I couldn’t quite figure out how to frame it — was my sense that, though it was really exciting to have a panel bringing together issues from such a wide range of perspectives from around the world, there was an irritating sense of the panel being explicitly marginalized as an “international” panel, as though the non-U.S., non-western-European voices were only able to speak to one another, rather than to the conference at large. There was the usual bit of exercise during the association’s general meeting later in the day about AOIR needing to include the perspectives of the developing world in the conference, but somehow these well-meaning requests fell flat for me, considering the ways that the non-western work already present at the conference is segregated.
Technorati Tags: aoir8
The first panel I made it to today (I slept in a tiny bit, and then got so irate over the Chronicle that I missed the first session) focused on the question of the openness of ostensibly open communities, including wiki contributors, YouTube users, and open-source programmers. First, Ralph Schroeder and Mattijs den Besten presented on the Pynchon wiki, started by pynchon-l denizen and Pynchon Hyperarts archive author Tim Ware; then Sheizaf Rafaeli presented his research with Yaron Ariel and Tsahi Hayat on opinion leaders in Wikipedia discussions; Alice Marwick presented a really interesting paper exploring claims of YouTube’s powers of “democratization,” comparing hype about the site with its actual use; Evangelia Berdou presented on the contributions of non-programmers to open-source projects; and Robert Mason and Karine Barzilai-Nahon presented on their research with David Hendy into the democratization of the software design process.
Reading the abstracts, I wouldn’t have thought these papers would work together as well as they did, but it proved to be a very interesting panel. The only problem was that with five papers in 90 minutes, the time keeper — for which position I volunteered — had to be pretty draconian. I’m now about to moderate another five-paper panel, so I’ve got to put the task-master hat back on…
Technorati Tags: aoir8
Okay, I’m in the middle of reading today’s Chronicle Careers column, and have just hit a paragraph (or two) that has me positively gobsmacked. The column is about ostensible faculty misuse of campus computing resources, and begins with a fairly reasonable anecdote about a faculty member being denied the ability to distribute news about an anti-war rally via an official campus announcements listserv, because policy clearly stated that the listserv was for official business only. Fair enough: as I can note from my own institution, anti-war rallies lead to puppies that need adoption and furniture for sale, and if your institution is big enough, that kind of thing would be fairly insupportable. But then there’s this:
Broader ethical principles are at play as well. For example, while it is generally considered unethical to use university e-mail accounts to engage in personal communication, most institutions are tolerant when it comes to minor personal usage, such as inviting friends to lunch or cocktails.
But institutions frown on extensive personal use, such as carrying on lengthy private exchanges or selling personal property on eBay, not to mention engaging in day trading or political advocacy. Those are all abuses to one degree or another.
I’m sorry; am I understanding that correctly? It’s considered unethical for me to use my campus email account to engage in non-official-business-related dialogue with my friend across the country, or across the hall, and my institution is merely being “tolerant” of such violations?
I suppose I understand the latter concerns, though frankly, as long as they’re not taking up work time or extensive network resources, I’m not sure I see the harm there, either. But I’m absolutely stunned by the general-principle separation of the official from the personal that the author seems to advocate here. Granted, these days, with free full-service email accounts to be had all over the place, it’s little hardship for an academic computing user to have a second personal account. But most of us in the profession came of computer-using age during the period when the only access that most of us could get — and certainly the only access worth anything — was through our institutions. Of course we use our email accounts for personal purposes; they’re our accounts.
I take the author’s overall point,* that maintaining a non-university email account can help faculty avoid any unwarranted investigations into one’s personal communications, but to intimate that the use of such an account for things other than official business is unethical seems to me a bit over the top, and more than a little impossible to support. No academic life is so clearly separable, it seems to me — work over here, personal stuff over there. God knows what he’d say about my using my work computer to write blog posts…
—–
*On the email question, that is; the column later goes on to insist that any attempt to install non-officially-sanctioned software on your university-provided computer is also a misuse of campus resources. The lunacy of this claim — particularly for Mac users — is not even worth exploring.
I’ve read (and written) any number of blog posts over the last few years analyzing the phenomenon of meta-blogging — posts that creep up on meta-meta-blogging, I guess: blogging about blogging about blogging. Some of these have focused on the notion of the “life cycle of the blog,” that most bloggers go through waves of excitement, enthusiasm, commitment, doubt, hiatus, return, re-commitment, boredom, and so forth, embroiled in an at time quite fraught tango with their blogs, built of love and hate, passion and violence and ennui, all entangled.
This is another one of those posts.
I find myself at a crossroads with this blogging thing, half losing confidence in it, and half still convinced that it’s important, to my work, my sense of myself as a scholar, my life. I’ve been pondering the possibility of stopping for a while — stopping with intent, rather than just drifting away — in part because I’m not sure how much good I’m doing here.
Frankly, I’m at a point where I’m just not all that interested in my own blogging, and I’m curious why. Perhaps it’s no more than a cyclical thing — it’s no accident that five years ago today I was thinking about much the same problem — feeling unable to come up with much interesting to say, in no small part because I’m unable to sit still and taskless long enough to think, unable to go through my daily life paying attention to the kinds of things worth writing about.
This time, however, these concerns are coupled with a set of less-than-attractive anxieties about falling readership. Partially, this is a stats-whore issue: since my migration to WordPress, my numbers are way down, and my Techorati “authority,” such as it ever was, has plummeted. These are probably not things I should be terribly concerned about — but, for better or for worse, I am.
So all of this — my apparently dwindling readership and my own diminishing interest — has me wondering why I’m still blogging. When I started, it was all about a need for immediate communication: I had all these small thoughts leftover from having just completed the book manuscript, and needed to get myself back into active conversation with other scholars after the isolation of grinding through such a long project. Lately, however, it seems like what I’ve been communicating has devolved into little more than rants and P.R., either complaining about being too busy or announcing the results of what I’ve been busy doing. And this dynamic doesn’t feel like it’s working anymore.
In part, I think, the problem has arisen because what I want right now is precisely that isolation that I needed to find my way out of five years ago; I’m moving into a phase of my scholarly life cycle when I want to stop everything else — stop writing smaller pieces and sit down with my research, trying to get a handle on the new, big project, which right now remains so amorphous that I can’t really grasp it.
What I need to do, if the blog is going to survive, is to find a way to make my blogging serve that project, to return on some level to writing for myself rather than an audience, to write less for communication and more for exploration, for investigation, for problem-solving — to make the blog part of the process, rather than something that’s working against the work I need to do.
Easier said than done, perhaps. But at least I’ve got a better sense of direction, and one that’s less reliant on my sense of an audience. The audience for the kind of work I need to do from here forward is, I think, primarily me, and the text I’m trying to write.
The last panel for me for today was a collection of papers focused on methodological questions, ranging from the formulation of research premises, through the collection of data, to the publication of results. Radhika Gajjala began with a paper on the immersive nature of online research, describing a methodology that acknowledges the researcher’s interconnection with the phenomena under study; Michelle Kazmer presented the results of her work with Bo Xie on the difficulties of using internet technologies to do qualitative interviews; Kirsten Foot talked about her work with Steve Schneider on the creation of a set of methodologies for researchers to use in archiving web objects; Dan Li spoke about her work with Gina Walejko on the difficulties of sampling blogs and bloggers; and Anders Fagerjord, finally, talked about the ways that electronic publishing promises innovation in the modes of composition and presentation for scholarly research.
Needless to say, this last was closest to my heart. Anders explored the history of the research journal, growing out of the letters once written from one scholar to another, transformed by print into letters written from one scholar to an entire learned society, before talking about the ways that multimedia, linking structures, and other network-based technologies might both speed the dissemination of research and create more engaging formats. His paper, still in progress, and being published in what he calls “stretch text format,” is, appropriately enough, available online.
Technorati Tags: aoir8
Post-lunch panel today on blogging, with four excellent papers: Sean Lawson, on milblogging in relationship to the military’s official attempts to regulate and restrict such online writing by military personnel; Gina Walejko on academic bloggers’ perceived senses of risk and reward in their blogging practices; Jia Lin on a comparative study of international blogging practices; and Clifford Tatum on the intersections of blogging and urban development in Seattle.
Happily, abstracts for all papers, and full-text for lots of papers, are available online, if you’d like to know more.
Technorati Tags: aoir8
The first keynote of the conference was from John Lester of Linden Labs, on Second Life. It was an interesting talk, for someone (like me) who has paid very little attention to what’s been going on there — a broad swath of the kind of experimentation that have been produced both by the developers and by the users (often completely unexpected by the developers). But it still wasn’t enough to get me to commit to spending the time necessary to get up to speed in SL, not enough to get me over my resistance, which is largely based on my sense that the vast majority of the SL experience is all about various forms of capitalist exchange.
On the one hand, it’s not fair to ask an industry guy — a developer — to be critical about the technology that he’s presenting. On the other hand, I find myself wanting something more. And I’m suspecting I’m not alone: the questions have been interesting, but the answers haven’t really gotten at their substance.
Technorati Tags: aoir8
First panel of the day, on sexuality and gender online; several excellent papers. I’m particularly compelled by Michele White’s exploration of the heteronormative pressures of eBay’s official discourses and the ways that individual sellers wind up rupturing the official narratives of community, and by Eszter Hargittai and Gina Walejko’s study of gender differences in online creative media production and sharing.
Wireless access here is good; I’ll hope to be posting more throughout the day.
Technorati Tags: aoir8
