:: Pondering mediated agency::

Mark Poster (2001. p.76):

"So exigent is the practice of self-constitution in communications in cyberspace, so strongly is agency here mediated by information machines, and utterly dispersed is the space of interaction that oppositional practices of earlier decades no longer seem able to take hold of the situation. To insist upon agency politics in this context is to bury one' face in the sand of the bygone age of Man."

:: All work and no play ... ::

Let's review what is due in the next four weeks, shall we?

1. Mid-term exam for SOCI300 - 5 out of 7 questions about Marxism (what is species-being again?)
   
2. Research proposal for SOCI 315 (that one is at least done)
   
3. Library research paper for SOCI315 to "inform & ground" my research project
   
4. Mid-term exam for SOCI315
   
5. Finish reading the Poster book and the Turkle book and "Metal and Flesh"; start and finish reading "The World-Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory", "Cyberpower", and one De Certeau book -- all for SOCI498L
   
6. Write an essay for my SOCI498L class
   
7. Start working on finding the interview participants for the research for SOCI315

Oh yeah - and did I mention that I work full-time and have a project to do at the office that must be done by the end of this year?

And here I thought that I'd have time to breathe and sleep in the next while. What a dull girl I'm going to be this Christmas!

:: Research proposal ::

That's it -- I'm done! It's written, printed, bound, ready to hand-in. Wow! That was a more difficult assignment than it should have been. I guess the complete and utter lack of an actual written hand-out explaning the prof's expectations for the assignment could be the reason for the difficulty.

I mentioned in yesterday's blogpost that I was doing this research on digital appropriation. Current working title is Robin Hood or Captain Hook? Identity, Agency & Power Relations in Digital Appropriation Tactics". Yeah I know it's a bit cute but the prof insisted on a "catchy" title, so she is going to get one.

Since I had to do an asbstract as part of the proposal, I thought I'd post it here -- might come in handy at a later date. Here it is:

A review of social scientific literature reveals that little has been written about the cultural implications of the Internet practices of file swapping and downloading of copyrighted cultural materials, a practice I call “digital appropriation”. The focus of this topic in the popular media has been on legal, financial and ethical issues and has tended to vilify or sensationalize this practice. I therefore propose to do an ethnographic research project involving a small sample of young adult Canadian males, to discover how they have integrated their digital appropriation practices into their identity, sense of agency and power relations with society. I do not expect to discover signs of stigma or loss of face because of their practice. I expect other themes may present, related to deviance and the nature of authorship and cultural artifacts in our post-modern society. However, I intend to focus the goal of the project towards generating a more balanced understanding of the identity work of young individuals who engage in the practice, by grounding that understanding in sociological and cultural studies theory, rather than in political science and economic terms.

What do you think? Let me know.

:: Digital appropriation ::

I'm doing an ethnographic research project for my SOCI 315 course on digital appropriation practices among people under 30. Digital appropriation is my umbrella term for all practices relating to the obtaining, using and recontextualizing of copyrighted digital materials. In even plainer terms, its about how people under 35 go about accessing, downloading, using and re-mixing/re-coding music, movies, software and texts without paying for the materials and without paying heed to copyright issues. I'm hoping to explore how these activists justify their acts, perform their power struggles, get personal meaning and pleasure from the acts and integrate them into their individual identity. I am also on the look out for any whiff of a collective consciousness or identity or social movement among those who are active participants in their digital appropriation practices.

One of the issues I'm already coming up against is locating such people and tapping into any potential communities. By activists, I mean people who engage in the practice deliberately and consciously as an act of defiance against the consumeristic corporatized Western world.

I know of plenty of people lwho are part of a larger and more common, unintegrated group of passive actors. These are people like a retiree I know who do it only in certain areas (i.e. downloading Microsoft software so they don't support Gates' "Dark Realm"powers). For this more common group, though, their minor acts of defiance are not part of their perceived identity and are actually usually at odds with their personalities and public roles.

While I'm interested in the reasons, meanings and pleasures of this latter, larger group, I would prefer to study the former group; the more active participants; those who see digital appropriation as a type of tactic of active resistance against the forces of domination. If I can't find enough of these conscious bricoleurs, I will resort to studying the passive group.

That is where I'm hoping the Internet itself can help. If you are reading this and know of anyone who would fall into the activist actor class I've mentioned, drop me a note or send a link to this blogpost to your contact. Confidentiality and anonymity are assured and I can put you in touch with my professor, if you wish to verify that this is honest, real, ethical and approved research.

Have comments, suggestions, remarks about this research or this type of research? Send those too. I'm always open to a good discussion, conversation or debate.

:: And one more... ::

Okay just one more joke about Bush before I get back to work on this proposal...

A lobbyist, on his way home from work in Washington, D.C., came to a dead halt in traffic and thought to himself, "Wow, this seems worse than usual."

He noticed a police officer walking between the lines of stopped cars, so he rolled down his window and asked, "Officer, what's the hold-up?"

The officer replied, "The President is depressed, so he stopped his motorcade and is threatening to douse himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. He says no one believes his stories about why we went to war in Iraq, or the connection between Saddam and al-Quada, or that his tax cuts will help anyone except his wealthy friends; the press called him on the lie about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger, and now Campbell Brown is threatening to sue him for a sexual innuendo he made at a recent press onference. So we're taking up a collection for him."

The lobbyist asks, "How much have you got so far?"

The officer replies, "About four gallons, but a lot of folks are still siphoning."

[Posted by Hoffmania on Blah3.org as a comment to the "heaven and hell" joke I blogged previously today

:: Funny and true::

Encountered this today while procrastinating on my Field Research project proposal...

It's a very funny variation on the standard "choice between heaven and hell" joke...this one involving George Bush.
[Found on Blah3.org]

:: Thanks Doug! ::

I'm putting in a small plug for Doug Knox, a helpful techie that maintains a Windows XP help/technical assistance site called "Doug's Windows 95/98/Me/XP Tweaks and Tips". His site has stopped me many times from pulling out my hair or throwing my PC out the window into the pool.

Take today for example -- through a small utility on his site, I was able to restore my Windows XP recycling bin to the desktop without having to manually edit the Registry (which I hate doing).

People like him and my fellow bloggers are the main reasons I haven't given up on the Internet.

:: I found one! ::

Those of you who do not live in Quebec, or more specifically the greater Montreal region might not understand or share my enthusiasm for the subject of this particular blogpost, so rather than waste your time, why not sideways surf over to one of the excellent real blogs listed over there in my links?

You still here? Okay then maybe you can get it.

Guess what?

I found one today. I found a member of that increasingly rare and probably endangered species of professional supposedly indigenous to Quebec.

You know...I found a doctor. A real, honest-to-goodness family doctor. Five minutes drive from my home and my office. A woman.

And the kicker? She's taking new patients. Yippee!!

" and now we do the dance of joy... " as Balki would say.

Oh, and despite being from the east of the province, where the English language is very rarely heard, she speaks my preferred language perfectly!

Yippee!

My three year saga of thumbing through the Yellow Pages, endlessly dialing numbers, relentlessly querying new people I've met for the name of their doctor, mercilessly interrogating any nurse/specialist/pharmaceutical sales rep I came across for their little black books -- all of it, over.

It wasn't even through my own efforts in the end. That's the funny bit. It was my husband's doing.

How so? well, my hubby just happened to mentioned absently one day to a guy he works with that we hadn't found a family doctor yet. And that guy just happened to have been at the CLSC that weekend and just happened to have asked about family doctors taking new patients and the CLSC just happened to have a handy list of new doctors who are taking new patients and the guy just happened to have the list with him at the office! Hubby quickly photocopied it and brought it home and sort of dropped it on my lap, no muss, no fanfare, no "yippee" attitude, just sort of "oh...yeah...here you go...

*head shake*

So I'm now doctored up. Weird how much safer it feels now, this life with a family doctor. I now have a name to put into those little blank boxes on certain kinds of forms.

Now if only I could find a good hairdresser...

:: Poster post ::

As I mentioned in my post from last week, this Poster book is something. Each time I sit down to read it, I get a few pages further and I have to stop.

Why? Because my head aches with the spaghetti of ideas, concepts, questions and possibilities I'm finding in those few pages. Now, I've never read Foucault, despite being urged to do so by my COMZ prof, but I'm quickly realizing that for someone of my academic bent and research interests, he is going to be part of my personal pantheon of theorists/philosophers/influencers, right up there with De Certeau, Hall, Goffman and Fiske.

Some of the questions and things I need to go read more about elsewhere before picking up Poster again are:

* Sociological / cultural studies definitions of subject vs. object
* Nature of subjectivity in post-modern social theory
* Concept of "otherness" from social philosophy and sociological theory a la Mead, Foucault, others?

I'm beginning to build a thread of this stuff in my head though into a possible research topic on the nature of digital appropriation versus authorship. To do this though, I have stacks and scads of reading to do.

And here I thought my December break would be spent decking the halls, baking the cookies and chortling the carols. Ha!

No rest for the wicked or the unenlightened.

:: "Hi Honey! I'm home...!" ::


Wow. It's been a long time. I'm actually rather intimidated by how long it has been since I've posted. Scary how easy it is to drop off the curve and slide into obscurity, to allow your piece of I-Space to shuffle off its coil, in a manner of speaking that mangles the Bard.

Well, I'm resurrecting it. Thanks to a person in my life who has encouraged me a lot lately to read widely on things that interest me and then to write about what I'm reading and how I'm reacting to it, here I am. Again.

So how will this time be different? Yes I'm still sort of blogging for marks, so that's not new. I'm still interested in the same themes of power, agency, individuality, identity and active resistance to the "force of domination". And yes I'm still very influenced by De Certeau and Hall, though I am starting to also get very fascinated by Foucault, thanks to a book called "What's the Matter with the Internet?" by Mark Poster.

I guess what's different then is me. I'm a year older and wiser ( I think/hope) and without an obvious mark at the end to get from doing this blogging thing, I will hopefully be a lot less pretentious and a lot freer to express myself in whatever voice I choose to adopt, even if that voice today is different from the one I will use next week or next month.

So...I'm going to try to shake off the feeling that I'm just indulging myself in the ultimate conceit of navel-gazing by doing this blogging thing and am going to just start doing it again.

I hope.

Stay tuned ::

[ Oh...and if you were curious or cared to know...remember how I started this blog as part of a project for a cultural studies course? Yeah? Well...I got an A+! Wahayy! *grin* ]