Fear & risk on Halloween

Fear is supposed to be part of Halloween. That was the fun of it - the idea of things getting all spooky and scary and weird.

At the same time, the spookiness and fear was supposed to be safe. Then along came the stories and reports. Next thing you know, parents are scared for real. Should they send their kids out? Will the little devils and divas and witches and ghosts get sick from the treats they gather? Suddenly the fear was coupled to risk in a way that made my parents and many others very wary about All Hallowed Eve.

However, it turns out that all those stories you've heard about razor blades in apples and poison in candy are actually urban legends., the famous urban-legend-debunking site Snopes says. So, too, do all the sociological literature on fear and risk.

So send out the kiddies tomorrow and don't worry if they sneak a few chocolate bars into their mouths before you have time to check over their haul. The little goblins will be fine.

Virtual stranger

When is a phone not just a phone? When it is also a people tracker.

Word of the day

Move over liminality...

You've been replaced.

My new favourite word of the day is limerence.

It refers to that strong infatuation period you encounter when you meet someone new and feel an instant, deep and intense attraction to them.

I can see it working better though for my purposes as the deep infatuation feeling people get about a new technology or system...as shown to me recently when my colleague Michael was extolling the virtues of Flickr to me recently over lunch.

[Found via downloading the PDF (72kb) of Angela Lewis' article on cyberspace limerence. Her article was originally published in the ACA Journal, Vol 4, no 1, 2004.]

Mustard does not = ketchup

A great story from the New Yorker magazine, written by Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point fame, it's about a man who gets inspired by mustard to create a better ketchup, but can't seem to beat out Heinz.

Considering that Canadians prefer their ketchup sweeter than Americans, I wonder if Jim Wigon considered trying to sell it here? After all, it has maple syrup in it...it's bound to sell well in Quebec, at least.

Quantum moments

I know I've said and thought stuff like this, though it was usually related to elections, not sports. [Requires free NY Times account to view] [found via Arts & Letters Daily]

New sidebar section

I'm trying to put my head further and further into the i-space by paying attention to what academics are saying and writing about the Internet or are actually doing on the Internet.

(I always wondered why, in English, the textual verb we use is on, not in, as in "I found this in the Internet, the way it is in French "dans l'internet".)

Thus, as of today, I'm going to try to maintain a list in the sidebar (over there on the right) of references to articles and books that have crossed my mental radar and that I want to get around to checking out in depth at some point.

If you have others you want to share with me, drop me a note or include them here in the comments. Given how little availability and few resources Concordia has on academic items of this subject, I need all the help I can get to self-empower myself through the completion of my Honours thesis.

Walking through wires

Part photo collage, part idea monologue, part free-form essay, Walking through Wires is all together rather fascinating.

Digital Future Project

Through the Digital Future Project, the University of Southern California's Centre for the Digital Future has released its New Internet report on the Internet use of Americans. Tracking usage over a four year time period, I'm not surprised they have noticed changes.

Among their findings:

• Internet usage is on the rise, with 3/4 of the US population now reporting they have access.
• Number of hours spent online has risen to an average of just over 12 hours a week.
• The websites users "trust" the most are those of the media and government agencies.

That last finding troubles me, along with its sister finding that people trust individuals' sites the least. While I'm not silly enough to think that there isn't a lot of inaccurate information out there on individual sites, I am Marxist enough to worry that the war for the eyeballs and trust of the masses is being given up once again to the status quo institutions.

Also, the study still conceptualizes online communications as being email only. While I can't contest this empirically, my gut feeling is that this is no longer the case. Even I was surprised at the number of people in one of my classes who report feeling "close ties" to various online communities. I would have preferred to have seen more nuanced questioning around this topic.

Still, in the conclusion of the study, the researchers are careful to note that online activity is just that - active. It isn't passive or uni-directional. They also note that the impact of the Internet on society must be taken seriously and that is certainly is being treated seriously by marketers.

They end the report with a shot across the bow of anyone who would attempt to trivialize the Internet's impact on society. They make a suprisingly empassioned case for the need to study the Internet's social impacts now, immediately.

Ten years ago, it would have seemed wildly farfetched to have predicted that the Internet might become the most influential change agent to affect culture since the creation of moveable type; today, that idea seems not so unreasonable" [P.98].

The group aims to keep the research going until they have hit the ten year milestone. I'm going to keep an eye on this reseach in the coming years - it will be interesting to see their progress and the evolution of their research approach and focus.

Download the PDF of the full report (251kb)

[report found via Tracy Kennedy's Netwoman blog]

Speaking of confessions...

Stumbled across this online space for anonymous confessions of every sort.

Browsing through the entries, my personal cares and woes fell away, humbled into silence.

Borrow "Farenheit 9/11" for free

In a brilliant political gambit, the documentarian Michael Moore has worked out a deal with video rental stores across the US to give free rentals of his movie Farenheit 9/11 on October 26.

Chuckle of the Day: Potential

Because not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up...

Decoding the discourse of negativity

In the Sociology of Fear and Risk course I'm taking this semester, I'm learning about how the discourses of power, fear, risk and hope are played out in the Western world. It has gotten me thinking a lot about these subtexts and how they're often applied to the examination and discourses around information technology generally and the Internet in particular.

One of the things I'm puzzling through is how or why the media choose to cover the negative or undesirable side effects of living with and through the Internet. Stories like this one about "cyberchrondia" (their term!) are examples of this decidely negative slant. The overall submessage seems to be that we need to fear the content we find online and fear our own desire to turn to the Internet as a source of information.

While I'm not so Marxist as to boldly claim that it is actually a message of containment, in which "They" want to keep us dependant on actual board-certified physicians and want us to stay disempowered, I can't help but wonder what the purpose of publishing such stories is. True, it is partly just market economics - negativity sells. But my studies this semester are starting to suggest other agendas as well.

Flash mobs

I'm quite interested in the type of transient and diffuse social phenomenon exhibited by flash mob behaviour. While the boundary between organized social action and flash mobbing seems a bit permeable, the latter fascinates me more probably because of its seeming randomness.

I found this overview of flash mobs and it even mentions Rheingold's concept of Smart Mobs. Good stuff!

Internet still seen as a tool

The third set of results of a mega study of young people's participation on the Internet in the UK was released today. In the report, they took the slant of trying to determine what the split was between levels of participation in civic interaction versus "other" activities. Sadly, there was no mention of community or even connectedness really with others -- the researchers seemed to have focused on Internet use as a solitary activity.

I find this notable and sad simultaneously because this survey was heavily funded, empirically driven, sociological in focus and sponsored by a large number of major corporations. The opportunity was definitely there to attempt to determine empiraclly how British youth use the online space for interpersonal connectedness, but the opportunity was ignored in favour of the entrenched view of the Internet as tool rather than space.

Pity.

Is Powerpoint evil?

I confess: I create a lot of Powerpoint presentations. I do a lot of standing in front of small crowds of people in corporate boardrooms hitting the [Enter] key and spouting off on my topic du jour. It's an unfortunate side effect of my day job. I never intended to become a Powerpoint dominatrix - it just sort of happened over the years.

Thus, it's probably not that surprising that I'm the go-to gal for any of my friends who need to learn and use this colourful tool of the Dark Side in order to better their grades and impress their profs.

My friend, Kelly has been availing herself lately of my help as she prepares to give a presentation of her digital game research in front of the GameCODE crowd today.

So I laughed out loud when reading Metafilter today. Kelly, this link's for you. Sorry I can't make it to the meeting today to cheer you on. Go on -- Break a leg!

Girls and their toys

The boys can keep their Xboxes, 21" LCD monitors and way-cool iPods.

This girl will take this comm toy instead. Or will dream about it at least - it isn't yet available in Canada.

Now if only you could buy colour skins for it. It would be mag cool in purple.

Chuckle of the day

From ABC News: Satellite destroys villager's house in China

Not laughing at the damage, but rather at the comment by the Chinese space experts, who say

"The landing technology of our country's satellites is very mature and the precision of the landing point is among the best in the world. Members of the public need not worry about this."

He's back!

Sound the trumpets. Gibson's back in the blogosphere.

When asked why he's decided to start his blog up again, he quoted the Spanish philospher Unamuno, who said "At times, to be silent is to lie".

[found via webmink]

Bar-coding humans

The more I look for indications of fear at work in society, the more stories I find of technologies and processes put in place to manage possible "just-in-case" scenarios.

To whit: There is a growing interest in RFID technology in North America, as the latest thing in ruthlessly efficient supply chain management. Walmart is going to be one of the largest users of RFID on the planet when they finish their own project later in the year.

While I have no issues with the idea of tagging pallets full of dish soap, baby sleepers and women's shoes, I do have an issue when they start tagging babies and women. And men and boys too, obviously.

This story in eWeek speaks about just such a possibility for the purposes of ensuring consistent error-free medical attention. The underlying message in the article is that the technology is worth it to ensure that you are treated properly and not subject to medical malpractice.

Huh? Excuse me if I fell asleep and missed something, but isn't the responsibility for ensuring appropriate medical attention when one is in the hospital on the shoulders of the hospital and its staff themselves?

The fear that is communicated in that story, via telling us that this is a good idea, is the fear of being ill-treated at the hands of the medical profession. It is the fear of not having control over our bodies and health. But it still seems fishy to me that they'd prefer we bar-code ourselves so they can scan us like so much merchandise rather than figure out a more efficient way of managing information about us without making us feel like dish soap on a pallet in a medical warehouse.

So, once again, the classic Stuart Hall question - who is being served by this message?

I may dream of wetware that will make my life better one day. This isn't it.

Canada creates smart mob potential?

In Concordia's recent Thursday Report, I found this interesting presentation of the upcoming Mobile Digital Commons Network project that intends to create smart mob capability by overlap physical and digital space through the use of handheld technology such as cellphones and PDAs.

While we're going to take a bit longer than some countries to get to a smart mob mass, this project should still produce interesting fodder for study for those of us here in the Maple Leaf country interested in this sort of converged juxtapolisition of being and space and time.

Overstepping boundaries

The idea that you can host your server outside of countries that don't completely recognize free speech or open commerce has been an important concept on the net since the early days. I remember the first time I had to advise a client to host his server in the Philippines in order to get around a tax and censorship law that was looking likely to be passed here in Canada.

This concept of the absolute nature of physical national boundaries in the meat realm being ported into the digital realm has shaped many ways in which the net itself is organized or used. Just look at the country domains for many countries as n example - the notion of nation is still prevalent in the digital context.

Equally, the notion of nations being unable to flex their politico-legal muscle beyond their existing physical boundaries in non-digital space has been usually regarded as true for the net as well. So I'm more than a little alarmed at how far over those boundaries the US has gone recently in order to assert their cultural views of what is good or right or legal.

Case in point: The recent server and hard drive storage seizure by the FBI at Indymedia in the UK.

• The issue as covered on Metafilter
  
• News coverage of the issue at the Register, a UK alternate media outlet for IT professionals
  
• Statewatch's coverage of the issue - Statewatch is a civil liberties group that monitors happenings in Europe
• Indymedia's own "late breaking news" page on the issue
• The Slashdot post from a Seattle techie who said they received the order from the FBI (and she notes that she asked them for the URL they were concerned about, they "didn't know what a URL was")
  

What do I find disturbing about this? Quite a few things, actually.

First off, the fact that the FBI is supposedly an agency whose mandate is for work within the long-established, mapped and understood physical realm boundaries and borders of the US. The accepted split is that they take care of things at home and the CIA takes care of things abroad.

Secondly, why did the UK bow to this? One would assume they believe in the absolute sovereignty of their own physical realm boundaries and that they would reject any attempt by any other nation or state to control or dictate the social, political or legal happenings within those borders.

The third and perhaps most oxidize to my mind is the fact that this over-stepping of boundaries is intended to get at content and community that exists in the digital realm. Some will argues, "yes but it was just servers they seized" to which I would argue that this isn't the case. They have seized ideas, concepts, identities of individuals who participated in the Indymedia network, indeed they seized a part of a thriving community that was not under their control anyway.

Finally, I find it interesting that a few days have passed since the original incident and very little coverage of the issue has circulated in the mainstream media.

Ok so maybe I'm being an idealist. I'm sure plenty of arguments about traditional versus grassroots power could be thrown my way. And I don't say that they are necessarily invalid.

I guess I'm just disturbed by how intent the US is on maintaining hegemonic control over ideas, even in realms that they don't own, manage or have operated on their own physical soil.

Renovations

I'm making changes around here. I met someone recently who has given me the inspiration to say, "out with the old, in with the new". Talking with them about blogging, I realized that I've had the same interface for *gasp* 2 years! and it was getting creaky and things weren't working anymore, such as the permalinks, or weren't working well, such as the comment feature.

So don't be surprised if you find that on some days over the next few weeks that this space looks horrible.

I'll get it back in shape though. I-Space 2.0 I guess?! :-)

:: Images marry words in blogs ::

A few years ago, when I first started blogging here, I posted a few entries about how the blogging medium was strikingly word-centric. At the time, it was rare to find photos or images on people's blogs and I remember thinking that this pointed to a certain primacy of textual meaning over visual.

I've since had people criticize me for this view, by pointing out that text is visual. My argument was (and I guess still is) that the visual isn't the same - words still leave more room for imagination, interpretation, individual choice. Photos and images are so framed by their takers that they are easier to use to exclude or contain meaning, rendering the viewer of them more passive in their possibilities for interpretation.

(If you've ever seen photos of me, you'd know what I mean - In pics, I always look pasty, dull, fat, even somewhat vapid...not words most people who know me in the meatworld would use...)

But with the rise of systems like Flickr and Hello and the ascension of a whole new kind of blogging called photoblogging, what does this new wave and new style of blogging do to my argument now?

:: Smart & micro ::

While I don't usually pay all that much attention to news of cars anymore, a friend forwarded me this link to a Wired story about a new kind of car coming out of a new kind of car company.

The company is a spin-off of Mercedes and the car, called the ForTwo, is...well..cute. And smart. And micro. No, not as in techno-wired. Micro as in tiny.

To whit: "The Fortwo can park practically anywhere, even sideways in a compact garage spot" the article notes.

Just check out this picture [click on the thumbnail to expand it]

Oh..and it's interesting to note that CNN doesn't think that the ForTwo will take off in North America.

:: Slash Fiction::

In another of this semester's courses, I need to do a library research project on any topic of my choice, but it needs to be done in a group setting with other classmates. I put together a group that would be willing to do something that relates to the online context and so we are working on doing research on the concept of online fan and slash fiction communities.

With that in mind, I stumbled across this overview of The Hive, a fan fiction community for fans of Laurie R. King's mystery novels. It has an excellent description of the nature of fan fiction that I find quite useful. Plus the links to other fan fiction sites are quite helpful.

:: Permeable borders ::

While reading Benedict Anderson's book, Imagined Communities, I came across a passage on page 19 about the difference in people's impressions of nationalty and their nation's ability to be "ruled" based on how fixed/rigid or porous/flexible the borders of nation were. Anderson makes the point to show the difference between the dynastic system that is a monarchy and the supposedly merit-based system that is most modern-day governments.

His point leans more towards the difference between spiritual/divine oriented systems (i.e. monarchy) and rational-legal systems (i.e. democracy). However, his point about the permeability and fluidity of national boundaries in monastic systems got me to thinking about how this same issue in the online space might facilitate self-government rather than dynastic ownership, effectively flipping his argument on its ear for our purposes of studying online communities.

Here's my thoughts:

• The innate nature of the web allows for linking to other pages/sites on the web. If we equate the web to a world of its own, you could then equate each website to being its own webnation within that webworld.
• Because the innate nature of the web allows easy access and linking between these webnations, in effect, it makes the boundaries between nations porous, fluid. A webnation can always bring in ideas and symbols from other webnations by linking them in and then reuse those ideas and symbols for its own purposes.
• In effect, this creates a defacto grassroots style of community management that keeps the nation flexible, dynamic, interpretive, the antithesis of a "divine" controlled monarchy but also not really a rationalized place such as we see in Canada/US.

So..with this in mind, the questions I'm pondering have to do with the effects of this grassroots nature on any given community (what I was calling here a webnation)...

Does the permeability and fluidity of the community's boundaries in the online space account for the quicker speed in which members of an online community often find intimacy with one another, identity within the community and a feeling overall of connectedness and membership and belong?

P.S. An interesting overview of some of the ideas from the book are found in a culture course overwiew on the University of Chicago's website, not that I agree with all of their conclusions, mind you.... ;-)

:: Negativity and technology ::

Why is it that all the mainstream press seem to be able to talk about when discussing technology is the negative slants and aspects?

This recent article from the Canadian newsmagazine Macleans is yet another example. Instead of discussing the issue of how technology enables new ways of living and being, they use the example of a dead man who wasn't discovered dead for two years because his bank accounts were setup to automatically deduct all his monthly expenses directly from his account.

Of course, they bring techo-luddite Neil Postman into the mix as well.

Is this more fear-mongering? I think that's probably a bit harsh, yet still, with the the mainstream media stories seeming to consist only of news about computer viruses, hackers, credit card theft online, people lying about their age/identity in chat rooms and the supposedly bad side effects on children who play video games etc. etc. you'd never know there were upsides to our wired world's way of life.