Value of the intangible

As I recover from a long and hellish December spent writing umpteen pages of essays for various courses, not to mention many application letters for grad school, I am looking ahead to the new semester that starts next week and considering what it means....my last one. Of my BA. Last one. Wow.

It's got me thinking about all the work I have done to get to this point. All the pages I've read of theory and articles. All the pages I've written of theory and ideas and garbage (sometimes). What of it is valuable? What is worth keeping? What would happen if I lost it? If my laptop got stolen?

Stories like this one about a stolen master thesis remind me that I should use the spanky new 200gb external drive I got for Christmas to back up the contents of my Uni folder. Also suggests that I should subscribe to a service like Xdrive when I head into thesis writing land later in the semester, when it is time for me to write up the results of the research project I'll be spearheading.

Sodoku isn't math?

Sodoku has become incredibly popular in La Belle Province of Quebec and has managed to infiltrate my household. I've avoided it, thinking it requires number skill, which I definitely do not have. However, according to American Scientist Online, it doesn't require math so much as it require logic and pattern recognition.

Okay I can buy that. But the medium of its message is still numbers. And I avoid numbers.

[found via Arts & Letters Daily]

Responsibility for action

Reading Arendt's Human Condition. Came across an interesting passage that could be useful in any analysis of the uses to which people put artistic works.

The perplexity is that in any series of events that together form a story with a unique meaning we can at best isolate the agent who set the whole process into motion; and although this agent frequently remains the subject, the "hero" of the story, we never can point unequivocally to him as the author of is eventual outcome" (p.185).

I take this to mean that the author/artist of a work can be seen in their work, but they cannot be held responsible for any action that is the outcome of their speech.

When one considers how this is otherwise often done around violence in video games, Hollywood movies, etc., this quote gives me pause to question my own beliefs.

Gaming in the old media

Does this Economist article that takes on Castronova's new book, Synthetic Worlds indicate that gaming and the analysts who cover it seriously have become newsworthy? I'll let Kelly do the dissecting of the article though, she's far more qualified.

Defining terms

A conversation with Kelly yesterday about terms and their definitions got me thinking about how common academic concepts get taken for granted in the classroom. While I have had an entire class that explained the concepts of ontology, epistemology and methodology, that was a rare occurence. Too often, the professors and instructors assume that we know what a given term or theme is or means.

To whit: dialectic.

Has anyone ever truly explained to you what it means? Independant of using it with Marxian thought?

I realized last night, as I worked through parts of Arendt's Human Condition, that the argument I'm attempting to setup for a long detailed paper on music as mass culture or art requires me to contrast Arendt's work sharply with Adorno's thought. It would seem to me that I'm attempting a dialectical argument.

My understanding of dialectic is the presentation of an argument that has a thesis, an opposing thesis (antithesis?) and a compare/contrast analytical conclusion (synthesis). But is this actually a dialectic?

I'd look downright silly if, in the title of my paper, I grandly proclaimed that I was presenting a dialectical argument, with Arendt on one side, Adorno on the other and my syntehsis of their thoughts with others and my own, if/when, in fact, I am not.

So what does dialectic truly mean anyway? And how am I supposed to know all of these terms and concepts that have cropped up if I've never had the chance to discuss them with someone?

There's my collaborative verbal learning style coming up to bite me again.

Anyway, if you have opinions on the meaning of dialectic, speak up please. My paper is due next wek and I don't want to read as a twit to the professor in question.

Yawning over movies

Yup, there it is. On the front page of my local daily newspaper. "Hollywood fears meltdown".

Seems that movie attendance in theatres is on a sharp decline with no signs of improving. Theatres are pinning their hopes on Jackson's newest, King Kong.

I have nothing against the big ape, but I was never interested in the other versions of this film. I mean, an oversized ape rampaging in Manhattan because he's fallen for a human woman? I have a lot of imagination, but that premise has just never worked for me. I'll be staying home this weekend.

And maybe that's the problem. For much of this year, I haven't gone to the movies. Oh sure I've seen films, including Narnia and the latest Hogwarts saga, and I've actually been very impressed and surprised by one (Derailed, believe it or not....see it definitely if you haven't already), but the year overall has been a big yawn at the box office, as far as I'm concerned. I've been getting more satisfaction out of my PVR.

Perhaps that's the reason? With so many of us able to now be choosy about what and when we watch anything, more of us are choosing to watch only what we think is interesting and forgoing the rest.

Or is it actually a sign that online entertainment, a la MMOs and downloadable TV via iTunes, has really started to hit it big?

I look at the near horizon and I see only one movie I'm looking forward to seeing...Brokeback Mountain. A big screen buddy movie about the lives of two cowboys and their more-than-average homosexual relationship? Wow. Count me in.

The rest of what's coming out though? *Yawn*.

Think I'll read a good book instead.

From the "OMG!" files

Talk about stupid ways to advertise...Alternet reports that Starbucks is paying people to drive around cities with fake coffee cups affixed to the roof of their cars. Why? Read the blogpost.

Order out of randomness

A friend has recently been exploring spirituality as a way of making sense of the world. His main argument for his exploration is that the world is too ordered to be a happy accident.

My own preference is for the theories of emergence trickling out these days from biology and sociology, from people like Barabi and from Johnson.

Then through Arts & Letters Daily, I found this article that makes a very coherent statement for the idea of the randomness of order and the impacts of that on religiosity.

Hopefully he reads it so we can continue our intense and enjoyable exchange on this topic. If you want to join in through the comments below, please do!

Feminism, femininity and me

A few things from this week that have me pondering femininity, feminism and me.

The first has to do with sexuality. While sitting in an intro level life development psychology class the other day, the professor asked the students what age do girls get sexy and at what age are women no longer sexy. The class overwhelmingly decided that the age range for "sexiness" was 14 to 40.

40!

Based on that, then, I have only two years and a few months before I fall off the map of human sexuality.

Hmph.

Why is it that, despite the portrayals of sexier older women in movies and television, a large number of supposedly forward-thinking university students still cling to the outmoded idea that women lose their sexiness once they hit their prime years, whereas men only get sexier?

Then today, I was reading that part of the blame may lay in the failure of feminism to change people's private opinions on the 21st century female experience. The issue is apparently with women's choices, as this excellent Alternet article on Stay-at-home feminists discusses.

The issue, they say, is that much of feminism's attacks and efforts have gone into changing public policy and business practice. Little has been done, though, to change individual opinions and the individual female's idea of what it means to be a woman in this century. Hence the fact that many successful women still give up their careers to stay at home once they have children, and most men still see this choice as a given necessity.

I ponder this these days as I attempt to discover how deeply into exploring female voices I want to go in my own social research. Am I ready to adopt a feminist agenda, when for years I've scoffed at the idea and avoided the label as if it carried the plague?

My first tentative forays into the idea were done last week when I finished a paper that explored digital practice as a safe and empowering place for teenage girls, who are otherwise excluded from public physical space and protected (smothered?) by parents concerned for their bodily safety.

Now I'm contemplating doing a small-scale dual qual/quan research project that explores how national survey data from Canada, US and the UK marginalize and trivialize female digital practice by studying it and configuring it as use, rather than practice, regardless of the ages they study.

The idea would be to use feminist research methods which propose a holistic approach merging quantitative data analysis with qualitative exploration of female meaning through oral histories of a few women at various points in the life span of women. One teenager, one young adult, one career adult and one retiree.

Is this the beginning of a way to redress the wrongs pointed out in the Alternet article? Am I willing to start working on research that will immediately be labeled feminist? Am I prepared for the results, both in the research and in me?

Has feminism truly failed? Am I willing to do something to stop it?

Good questions. Don't know yet. But have to decide soon. My undergraduate studies are rapidly coming to an close, as this semester winds down and leaves me only one more to go. One more before I have to hit the ground running as an emerging scholar.

Am I willing to take this issue on and make it a big part of my future efforts? Am I willing to wear the feminist label and do what it takes to be sure the goals of feminism don't fail?

Stay tuned.

Geek gear

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Some snow on the ground, -8 degrees and the promotional emails advertising geek geer are coming into my Outlook all fast and furious.

Most make me yawn.. but this? Are you kidding? That is definitely geek gear. Exceedingly cool.

Homogenity of taste

20 years ago, had someone said to the Europeans that the American wine makers would threaten their business by changing the palates of the populace, the Euro vintners would have laughed at them.

Now, though, it seems like the US cultural juggernaut has managed just that. The sales of fruity, soft wines have gone up, prompting some European winemakers to start using US methods and apparently threatening ancient European traditions and techniques.

More proof of the globalizing homogeneity of taste?

Quiet calm of classic poems

With snow softly falling outside my window, muffling street sounds and blanketing the bare flowerbeds of my front yard, I find myself in a pensive and literary mindset.

On such days, I look to poetry to explain the thoughts and feelings drifting in and around me. So today, rather than pithy or deep thoughts of my own, I shall share a favourite poem.

Psalm of Life
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, - act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sand of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solenm main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait

Why some languages & not others

Found out about this book on why certain languages endured while others died out, despite the fact that both may have been used for trade.

An excellent review of it is available here.

Many of my friends and fellow scholars are interested in sociolinguistics, so I can see this book going under the tree for a few of them.

On my plate

I got asked today what I'm working on at the moment. Rather than repeating it to a few people, I thought I'd blog it.

My writing plate as of today:

• Paper - How digital fan fiction communities allow adolescent females to transcend the uncertainty and stigma of their changing female bodies while remaining firmly entrenched in their bedroom princessdoms. (For a Youth Culture course)
  
• Paper - How commodification of diamonds has led to the right hand diamond ring as part of a social system of identity presentation for successful, independent career women. (For a Material Culture course)
  
• Presentation - The social system of the right hand diamond ring. (For the material culture course)
  
• Paper - The acceleration of the use and destruction of time through the dominance of the mass culture system over high culture (For a Contemporary Social Theory course)
• 1 mid-term exam (Field Research) and two finals (Youth Culture; Womb to Tomb: Psychological Development through the Life Span)
• Five grad school applications, with their letters of intent or statements of purpose.
  
• Phase II of the GameCODE website.
  

I think I needed to see it presented this way, in a list. Now I can recognize that I have a lot to do in the next 30 days and perhaps I'll stop procrastinating?

yeah....right...sounds good though hmmm? Everyone needs goals!

A list of "isms"

Went looking in the Wikipedia for a definition of social determinism and then, in classic procrastination style, followed a sideways link to a master list of "isms" -- ideas, concepts or schools of thought that end in 'ism".

I knew there were quite a few, but had no idea of how many until I started scrolling that list.

Language evolution or devolution?

This book excerpt about the constant (insidious?) creeping of popular culture speak into the everyday vernacular was interesting, but more interesting perhaps is the comment one person makes about "hasn't it always been thus?"

Got me thinking. What words do I use from my own pop culture background that aren't so popular anymore?

"Whatever"

"Excellent"

"It's just a little thing"

"Talk to the hand".

Wow. More than I thought, and that was just based on a quick 30 second brainstorm.

Doe that make me more accessible or do I just sound dumb? Is this all a devolution of the English language or just another step forward in its constant mutation and evolution?

Digerati

While a bit trite in the way they have been labelled, many of the people on this list do fit my idea of who the digerati would be or are.

Scholar or Researcher?

As I work on my statements of intent for grad schools, I'm grappling with the idea of whether I want to be a scholar or a researcher. I was having trouble figuring out the finer distinction between the two when I got an email from the autoethnography mailing list that deals with exactly that.

Robert Scholes draws a distinction between research and scholarship. Research," he writes, "is progressive; it involves invention or discovery of something new. And it often leads to new techniques or products, for which it is highly rewarded. Scholarship, by contrast, is more about recovery than discovery. It is about understanding more clearly or more richly the meaning of texts or events from the past, including how we got to our present cultural situation. And this is true whether the past is ancient, as in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, or early modern, as in Michael McKeon's Origins of the English Novel, or quite recent, as in Jane Gallop's Around 1981. The end product of this scholarship is not new commercial processes or products; it is a pedagogy enhanced by the best knowledge available. Scholarship is learning in the service of teaching.

I think this is a perfect synthesis of what I've been trying to express.

It also will give me a way to counter a professor I've been having a friendly argument with about the "proper" result of grad school and post-grad studies, because I now realize I was expressing a desire to be a researcher whereas he gets his satisfaction from being a scholar.

Avatars

Much of what is in this journal article about avatars in online space isn't surprising to me, but I'm pleased to see some truly scholarly research addressed to the concept outside of game studies.

Shortlist getting shorter

My slog into research on potential grad schools and their requirements for a grad student continues. Amazing how many different hoops have to be jumped through - I really hope my references will come along for the ride.

I had a chat this afternoon with an alumni of the Communications department at University of Massachusetts - Amherst who is now a professor at Concordia. His input and feedback were very enlightening and fanned the flames of my desire go to UMass.

(He has also suggested Concordia's own Communication program. I like the idea of not having to sell my house and move right away, but I'm not sure there is anyone there interested in the same things as I am. Still worth keeping in mind...)

Plus the discovery of the joint York University / Ryerson University MA in Communications and Culture has got me rethinking the need to go to the USA.

So as of today, I'm kicking off a Grad School Shortlist over there on the right ---->

I've whittled that list down to 5 schools from an original group of somewhere between 12 and 16. Ideally I'd like it to be even shorter, but the application deadlines just won't allow it. Current cities then are Toronto, Amherst (MA), Calgary, Vancouver and Washington, DC.

If you have opinions about any of the programs and/or schools listed, do drop me a note.

Power and agency

I originally created this space to explore the ideas of power, agency and discourse around the digital. Power, in my mind, is crucial to understanding popular discourse, consumerism, indeed to culture itself. It is ubiquitous and omniscient. As I’ve explained to people what it is I’m trying to get at through this space and what it gives me, the terms “power” and “agency” keep coming up. Every now and then, someone will actually ask me what I mean by power and I end up articulating it to them, only to find that their idea of power and mine are quite different.

Social sciences are dominated by the ideal concept of power explained by Michel Foucault, which is that power is a force at work in social constructs (institutions, social order, etc.) and as such, isn’t something one “has” or “hasn’t”. It isn’t something one uses over someone.

Yet, while this may be the ideal concept, in reality, the research and popular discourse of power still clings to the polarized duality of power as being something owned by one person at the expense of the other. Perhaps this is why the notion of agency gets so troublesome, then, for social scientists. They are supposed to be trained in the Foucauldian sense of power, but their own culture structures power as the result of an interaction, rather than a force at work on all parties in the interaction.

Before I explain my own conception of the concepts of power and agency, I should point out that I have not yet read Foucault in the original – I have only read other people’s interpretations or truth claims about Foucault’s work. Nor have I read much yet on other people’s interpretations of agency. Thus, I refuse to claim that my ideas and conceptualizations are necessary novel or unique or even nuanced per se. One of my personal projects, then, for the next few months will be to work my way through the essays in Power/Knowledge, in order to try to get a sense for myself of what Foucault himself says about power.

So what is power for me? What is agency? Power is a force that is at work in the social. It is a result of past interactions, generalized out to the effects that is then concretized down again into new interactions. Power is initiator and result. It is the ability to accomplish action, whether that action is goal-directed or purely creative in Joas’ sense of the term. Here, then, the social concept of power meets up with the individual concept of agency.

Agency is the sense of empowerment internalized by an individual that allows them to act in life. Action, then, in this sense, is the creation and synthesis of choice. The act of choosing is an action in and of itself. Agency is that creative taking-in of power, merging it with idea, ideals and will and through that recipe, the creation of an act. The act can be a thought crystallized into knowing. It can be a desire acted upon. It can be a goal to which one strived. At work within all action, then, is the idea of agency, the pure ability to act. Agency gives the ability for an individual the ability to work within the world. Agency, then, is power integrated or operationalized within the individual.

In this sense, then, neither power nor agency are binary forces and should not be talked about as such. The nuances and subtleties of power and agency working within and above interaction, structure and social order are crucial to understanding humananity and the world and should, therefore, never be trivialized down to the level of a dichotomy.

Quote diving

As I'm starting to formulate my responses to grad school applications, I'm browsing around Wikiquote, looking for the right quotation to sum up how I feel about the journey I'm about to embark on as a serious scholar. It was inspired, actually, by a TV show that claimed a quotation apparently from Winston Churchill, which says, "The farther back you can look, the farther forward you can see" (although I've found no reliable proof yet that he actually said this).

Others from him I've liked tonight:

What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

And, as comic relief, this one:

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

Joas and creativity

I'm working on a social theory paper for a course, in which I'm following the lead of Hans Joas who argues that an understanding of creativity as a force at work in human interaction would advance our understandings of the question of what it means to be human.

While trying to synthesize his theory in a way that makes sense without dealing with his historical precedents of Peirce, Mead and Dewey, I googled Joas and came upon this excellent interview. Not only does he speak of his theory in more accessible terms, he also talks about why he got interested in it in the first place.

Hyping brands

As my interest in digital studies wanes a bit and my interest in consumer culture intensifies, I've been paying more attention to sites and blogs that deal with this issue. A project spearheaded by a Concordia University professor is making the issue of product placement in entertainment media a central area of inquiry and the project's website is very illuminating.

This area is one I find very interesting. I tend to turn brand spotting into a critique game that I play when I watch TV or go to movies -- I'll notice how often brands appear and then critique whether the brand shown was realistic in its context. As an example, does Apple really think that we believe that FBI agents would use a Powerbook, as seen in a recent episode of Numb3rs?

Even more interesting is how this tendency carries over into the digital world, particularly in video games. While many PS2 games use spoof ads and products, Kelly tells me that this is increasingly giving way to real products appearing in digital worlds. I'm not as interested in the economic spin to it, the way Costranova would be. I'm more interested in ideas such as how it contributes to a feeling of realism and how it alters or strengthens power relations between players and world designers/owners.

Ok so maybe my interest in the digital hasn't waned - it's just slumbering, waiting for a new focus and passion to emerge. Is this it? Wait and see.

Blogs become journals

I'm sure a lot of "old skool" bloggers (circa 1998) are gnashing their teeth over the fact that blogs are increasingly viewed as little more than online confessionals. There used to be a clear-cut difference between a journal and a blog, but not so much anymore, apparently. Not in the mass media, anyway.

The black, white and gray of life

I'm becoming profoundly interested in doing macro-analysis of dominant discourses in western life. I have had a hard time, though, articulating to people what I mean by this concept. Saying it this way tends to get me blank stares.

But now, after having burned through half of Hewitt's amazing! book, Dilemmas of the American Self, I have found a simpatico soul who has enabled me to put into words what it is I want to do, in a way that people should "get it"

Hewitt argues for the need for less polarized theories of culture, self and society. He argues that, while Americans live life on a balancing beam somewhere in the middle of the continuum between communaltiy and individuality, they talk about themselves, others, and their society in a polarized way. His aim in the book is to show that this is what happens, and to highlight the fallacies of various social theorists who, themselves, contribute to this polarization.

What Hewitt has done in this book is exactly what I want to set out to do with regards to digital culture and consumer culture. I want to examine, analyze, articulate and be critical of the polarized discourses around digital life and consumer culture. I want articulate how life is actually lived, and push for more theories that deal with life in this more nuanced area.

Now I can frame my interest by saying:

Life is lived in the gray, but talked about as if it were black and white.

Too bad Hewitt has retired - he might have made a very interesting grad school adviser. But it has got me looking seriously at UMass Amherst as a school.

Inevitability of net development

Proof that porn drives net development? AlterNet reports that a scant 24 hours after the video iPod was released, a few adult content providers started offering "a girl to go".

Engage

In the past, when I read comments about the seeming "dangerousness" of digital life, I shake my head, sigh, make a note of it and move on. I did not engage in debating it.

However, the response to my paper at the recent AoIR conference got me thinking that perhaps it is wrong of me to do so. If I'm going to deconstruct and understand the debate about fear and risk in the digital, and articulate for a more careful and nuanced understanding of it, I should take up my position within the discourse and defend it from within.

When I came across this blogpost about the idea of the risk presented by corporate ownership of digital space, I felt this presented me with the opportunity I needed to jump into the waters. While I don't normally use my piece of the I-Space to engage with others in debates, I felt it was time I started to do so.

Ethan Zuckerman was responding to a blogpost from a fellow Concordia student, Michael Leczner, on this. Ethan says:

He makes the interesting point that, as people start spending more of their time, energy and creativity in these spaces, they're living large pieces of their lives in environments owned by companies that may or may not have their best interests at heart. An important aspect of their life is tied to a specific company, its fortunes and its policies. Michael proposes an open source project to create a community space that's free of some of these encumbrances.

While I definitely welcome the idea of more open source spaces in which to be digital, what I take issue with is the artificial duality and apparent ahistoricity of the arguments put forth.

I have a problem with any aspect of the digital discourse that position life in the digital as being inherently or fundamentally different from life in the corporeal. While I understand that was not the point of their posts, not for Michael nor for Ethan, it is certainly one of the messages that come across.

The idea of living in spaces that are owned by other companies and having important aspects of human life sewn up by corporations is certainly not new or unique to the digital. The dawn of feudalism and the birth of capitalism took care of that. While I embrace the idea of open source, I do not it believe it is the answer to any ills of digital capitalism.

If someone wants to argue for the point of digital life's risks as being a case of the intensification of a phenomenon that's been going on since the 1600s, that is great. I am all for it. But I think it is important to be attentive to the side messages given off when discussing open source or free wireless or what not. The framing of these issues often implies an oppositional disconnect with human experience. These discussions need to be careful that they do not contribute an imaginary panicked discourse that simultaneously mythologizes life in the digital and presents it as a whole new and risky space, effectively therefore disconnecting it from human history.

Gift ideas

I can think of a few gamer types on my Christmas list who would probably love a keyboard like this one for those 3am World of Warcraft raids...

Is Google evil?

I clicked over to Google Scholar last night to do some research for a Contemporary Social Theory class. Somehow, I procrastinated my way over to the Google Labs page and wow! have they expanded! I knew that they were working on a lot of stuff, based on the media coverage I'd been following about them. I guess I didn't realize just how much they'd been adding. Video. Ride Finder. Suggest. The list is long.

Is Google betraying its company philosophy of "Do no evil"? Some think so, says Tim Wu at Slate and the recent spate of negative coverage is an example, he notes, of the clash of Silicon Valley values with old-school Hollywood protectionism.

Oh! if you have any ideas on how to link together the frame analysis work of Goffman with the pragmatist school of philosophy per Joas/Mead/Dewey, drop me a note! I'm desperate!

Time wasting for word nerds

I've been accused, yes, of being a word nerd. You know, one of those people who will spend ten minutes finding the perfect word to use to describe some seemingly-to-others esoteric difference of subtlety of meaning.

Plus, with the fact that I've worked in the Internet "industry" for so long and have been subjected to hundreds of acronyms, I've also been known to joke that "Internet = Acronym Hell"

So it shouldn't be surprising that the Acronym Finder has the potential to give me many fine hours of procrastination paradise, right around now when all the mid-terms and exams are starting to pile up alarmingly.

[ found via polyglot conspiracy ]

This day in history

I justed added a nice new link over there ------>

Pops you over to the BBC's "This day in history" page, for the notable events of the past on any given day.

Was inspired by a similar linking idea from Mr. Selvarajah who does this by linking to the Wikipedia. But for this type of thing, I prefer the BBC.

Notable conference

Considering my fascination with the question of what it means to be human in digitally-dependent space, ACLA's annual conference next March is utterly fascinating to me. In particular, the streams, After the Post-Human: Beyond the Cyborg Manifesto and Creativity and the Human attract me greatly, though there are about a dozen others that sound utterly engrossing. The latter of the two streams I noted above probably interests me most strongly right now, possibly due to the paper I'm starting to research on sociological theories of creativity in action.

Oh to be able to have the money and time to attend!

Walmart Boycott

I have never felt completely comfortable shopping at Walmart. It has been suggested to me that my discomfort stems from the sheer size of the stores compared to the relatively smaller Zellers and Federated Co-op stores that were a fixture of my own childhood shopping landscape. But I don't think that is the reason.

Some of it stems from the way they moved into the Canadian marketplace. They bought out all the Kmarts across the country, shut them down, laid off the workers, then reopened under the Walmart banner. I remember telling people I would boycott Walmart as a result of that and their overly American, overly zealously capitalist philosophy. I remember people looking at me like I'd grown a third head and then telling me about all the bargains they'd gotten recently at Walmart.

Over time, my position softened and I have been guilty of stopping in and spending far too much on cosmetics, housewares, camping gear and the like. I usually leave feeling bewildered, anxious and more than little bit guilty. Seems I'm not alone in my spending habits, though most figures are for the US only, I believe.

They're opening another huge store not 10 minutes from my house. It seems to be about triple the size of the existing Laval Walmart store and the city is busy redoing all the roads and highways in the area to allow access to this shopping behemoth. Robert Greenwald gives me an idea of what is to come in my neighbourhood, though, and yes I'm worried. Not just for the traffic and noise and pollution, but also for the social implications for the small retailers down the street from me and for the family farms and greenhouses that operate near it. Fortune magazine has even written about these sorry aspects of the phenomenon and about the new documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price coming out soon from Robert Greenwald.

Then I read this AlterNet article today about Walmart and while, yes, it is obviously slanted towards being completely negative, I found it refreshingly honest and definitely eye-opening. And guilt-inducing too, I admit.

So I'm renewing my old boycott and strengthening my resolve to avoid the new store's lure. Perhaps I can arrange one of the first Canadian Whirl-Mart protests?

Internet Generations 6.0 report

Here it is, the end of the second day of presentations and networking at the AoIR's Internet Generations 6.0 conference in Chicago. I'm tired but happily so. Just got back from the gala event at the Mid-America club on the 80th floor of the AoN centre building. Breathtaking view and great buffet spread too.

the mix of people here seems to be heavily slanted in favour of communications faculty, and so far I've seen a lot of presentations that were survey data and not a lot of contextualization. The surveys themselves were well done by the looks of it though, not that I'm a good person to judge, given that I'm much more into theory and tend to fall asleep in my stats classes. However, I did see a few interesting analyses of website linking practices in political campaigns and another session on mobile technology and GPS usage for cultural public education purposes in a public park in Montreal.

I've also talked to quite a few people about MA and PhD programs in the US and the UK and gotten some great pointers on schools to look into that I hadn't considered, including NorthWestern, UMinn and UWash. I got good feedback too on the CCT program at Georgetown from a few alumni (though oddly no one from CCT was here as a presenter) as well as possiblities at UTA. I've met some nice people over the last few days, including a few students that might be able to contribute to GameCODE. One person even has a semiotics background, which should make Kelly happy.

I had a good response to my own paper, which relieved and pleased me. I got a lot of encouragement to submit it for journals so I might try doing that over the Christmas holidays when other papers aren't competing for my attention. I had a decent number of requests for a copy of it so they could review it and cite it. An interest in Mary Douglas' work on anomalies per my take on her work seems to have struck a chord for a few academics interested in sociolinguistics, of all things.

One more day to go and then it's home to finish my material culture paper. Real life and all of that.

Speaking of mind to action...

Ok so the sociology trading cards I get. And I like. A lot, as long-time readers of this space will probably know, this is about the fourth time or so I've blogged about them.

Heck, a pack of these peoples are even duly noted on my 2005 Christmas list (send me an email and I'll send the list to you...if you were thinking of getting me a gift, that is....)

But...Lego? Really? What are those people over there in England eating these days?

Okay maybe I'm just miffed because I don't know most of the people in the lineup, except by name hearsay. Okay...maybe Stuart Hall...but Michel Foucault? Just seems so plastic.

Now....the Foucault action figure, though? Oh yes....

Fragmentary experience = Holistic life

If I'm correctly reading Joas' (1996) philosophical overview of John Dewey's conceptions of art, religion, action and ideals in Joas' text, then these ideas could be brought to bear on theories of adaptation to the digital and multiple simultaneous presentations of self/identity...

Discussing Dewey's ideas, Joas says "a holistic self tends to sublate the rapid sequence of different scenarios that is our reality into a totality. It is through the creative powers of imagination that human beings gain access to the ideals" (p.143). Again looking through Dewey's conceptions, Joas notes that ideals are a person's "unquestionable binding values" and that they are "not something that we decide freely to set ourselves; rather they take hold of us and are at the root of our individual wishes and goals" (p.143).

Not sure what I'd need of this to make some arguments about the reality of the digital and the whole nature of the human living through that reality...or the conceptions of trust/risk in the digital (my current pre-occupation research and paper-wise) ...but at least by capturing it here, I've thought it out a bit.

Pragmatic pretzling

On this gloriously sunny late-September afternoon, when I'd much rather be outside walking in the briskly warm air, I'm instead hunkered over my desk and laptop, trying to suss out the concepts, logic, objections, refutations and adaptations of the philosophy known as Pragmatism. My poor brain just doesn't fire as fast as it used to, so it's taking a while to get pretzel it around these concepts.

I'm doing this by reading an expert of a book written by Hans Joas (1996) called The Creativity of Action, in which he conceptualizes action according to Pierce's pragmatic approach and G.H. Mead's approach to the integration of mind and self, in both the individual and social sense of the terms.

I do wish that the excerpt provided more meat about his take on Mead. I just finished re-reading swatches of Mead's Mind, Self & Society for my Contemporary Social Theory course and the professor seems rather enamoured of the whole school of pragmatism. So I'm sure Friday's class will be another exercise in pretzling my brain around new theories and takes that aren't quite in line with what I thought I read.

Cute commuter

My current car, a 2002 Honda Civic sedan, goes off-lease in a few weeks and with 93,000 km klicked into it, I'm looking to retire it and replace it with something else.

So...I'm car shopping.

If I lived solely in the city and never had to drive the 40 or the 401 anywhere, I'd definitely be looking more seriously at buying one of these new s.m.a.r.t. cars - turns out that they're CAD$16,000 which is less than I thought they'd be.

Doesn't hurt that the colour can be customized on a whim and they get amazing gas mileage. Plus they've got that cool euro hip factor going on.

Sadly, though, I'm a suburbanite these days. And when I move southward next summer, I'll need something that can really go on the Interstates. This probably won't be it.

But it's so cute!

Blogging it real

Clicked over to Spencer Steel's piece of the i-space, expecting to see information about the Straight Edge subculture (as my professor calls it) that I could use in my paper, only to find this blog entry.

Wow.

What can I say? I'm a sucker for smart, real and emotive prose. Especially from Brits.

Fighting the culture vultures

A few years ago, for an intro level field research course, I wrote a research proposal that proposed a study of how youth viewed music and software sharing and downloading. While I ended up dropping the class due to a clueless professor who didn't believe the study of things digital was a worthy sociological topic (?!) the idea of that research never quite left me. Back then, most of the info I found on the net was preaching how awful it was and how illegal. There was little in the discourse from the other side, or at least little that was actually informed, organized and overt.

Things have definitely changed. Today, while browsing the net for information on the Straight Edge youth subculture/movement/philosophy for my SOCI 398 Youth Culture course, I came across the website of a non-profit organization called Downhill Battle. They have a lot of information that presents the other side of the argument for music and software sharing. They've also done more street activism that I would not have thought possible. Their Thanksgiving 2003 warning sticker campaign on large US retailers of CDs is a case in point.

Perhaps it is time to revisit that idea of mine. Maybe for my new senior-level field research course? hmmm......

It's raining links

So this is what I've been needing to do to generate thoughts and links for this i-space. I needed a web-based, net-centric research project, like the one I'm doing on youth subcultures for my SOCI 398 course.

I've spent four hours googling tonight for this assignment. Here's the assignment:

Construct a history of one of the following youth subcultures:

a) riot grrls

b) straight edgers

c) rude boys

d) skinheads

e) Goths

f) metalheads

g) hippie kids

h) hip-hoppers

i) ravers

j) punks

Collect information through websites and tell the story of this subculture as it is told through the sites. You will produce a written testimony about what motivates youth to participate in the subculture as well as the experiences that constitute being a part of the subculture as presented through the websites.

Include as much of the following information as possible in your narrative:

1) Where and how did this subculture begin?

2) What are the signs, symbols and meanings attached to this subculture?

3) What does this subculture declare to be its principles and intentions (manifesto)?

4) What problems does this subcutlreu attempt to confront?

5) How does membership in this subculture attempt to deal with these problems?

6) Are there areas of disagreement between sites?

7) What is the story fo the subculture being told through the sites and for what audience is this story designed?

This narrative is to be between 4 and 5 double-spaced word-processed pages.

Shouldn't be that tough, but I'm having trouble choosing a topic. So....While trying to decide whether or not to do my project on Goths or Straight Edgers turned up the following interesting sites:

- Have a burning important question that you'd like experts to answer? Dropping Knowledge is setting out to do just that.

- Curious about what is important to youth? Alternet.org is a website dedicated to news and musings on all things youth.

- Looking for a really alternative goth/fetish club and just happen to be in Vancouver or plan to visit? Apparently the apt-named Sin City is the place to go.

- According to Morbid Outlook, my gothic name is Melusine Metalwing

I could put about a half-dozen more but I'll try to get back into googling.

Oh..and at the moment, topic-focus-wise, I've flip-flopped back to Straight-Edgers. Story seems more linear and therefore possibly easier to tell.

Micronations

School has started again and I'm beginning to think I'm a wee bit nuts. Five courses, of which 3 are senior/honours/uber-geek tough courses, replete with thick and chewy social theory and the requisite huge mind-pretzeling papers to write.

Ok so it's true that I'm not working full-time for a living anymore (note to self - must adjust my footer for this blog now that I'm "just" a student). But I am still working for cash. I've taken on the role of research coordinator/assistant for the GameCODE project at Concordia.

Enough about that...I have to post some real insight here or my friends won't stop sending me email asking me if this space is dead, and forcing me to respond that, no, it's not, it's only sleeping....

While googling today, looking for information on Goth youth subcultures for a sociology course project on youth music scenes, I stumbled across the concept of micronations on Google. Given that my head is very much into the distinctions between macro and micro manifestations of social phenomena (don't ask), I clicked over to Wikipedia to check it out and it presents micronations as a neological term to describe state-like entities. Hmmm...like digital communities?

Sort of, is the answer. This article then peaked my interest, so I delved further and according to this article on a seemingly academic site run by a Dutch PhD student, it is a valid social phenomena. Might have to look into this more, or at least keep a Google alert going on the term, in case it should go big (or is that macro?).

(and yes...neologism is the best new word I learn this week.....)

On top

Some Ottawa friends googled me recently and told me that I am now the top hit when my name is typed in, because of my impending presentation at the upcoming AoIR conference. I was surprised and skeptical because doing this in the past, I always turned up some woman from the U.S.

I tried it myself and sure enough...here I am.

And right underneath the AoIR links to that presentation and conference info is a link to this space.

Wow.

I have to admit, after 10+ years of search engine anonymity, this newfound top-o-the-charts celebrity is a bit intimidating. Suppose it can't hurt though when I'm applying for US grad schools this winter?

Speaking of which, I'm going to be totally schizo on the GRE tests I've got to take in order to get admitted to said schools. My math skills are so old and out of date that I don't even know where to begin on most of the math samples I've done, yet I tend to score pretty darn near 100% on the language tests. Wonder if the over-the-top language scores will be sufficient on their own to get me in?

Otherwise, I'll be stuck at the U of T, Carleton or as a last resort, McGill *shudder*

Snippets and bits

Yes I'm alive. Yes I'm back from camping. Yes it was good.

But, despite all my fitness training these last four months to strengthen my back, I hurt myself. Again.

More precisely, I strained my back and might have been able to work it out if it weren't for the fact that 5 days after I got back, I hitched a ride in the backseat of an Echo with some pals who were heading to Niagara Falls but I got off in Oshawa to visit an old pal. I then spent 9 hours walking around a huge mall in flip flops toting heavy Williams & Sonoma bags full of margarita mix, guacomole mix and measuring spoons. That, plus lugging heavy luggage aboard the VIA train home and then trying to remove it from the luggage storage area and *rrrriiip!* there it went.

I've been "convalescing" ever since, trying to get it back in shape.

So this week's variety of posts will be snippets and bits of things I've been thinking about or reading. I'll put them all down, rather than saving them for individual posts, as I won't be online much in the next two weeks - more travel and camping is forthcoming.

Brain food on vacation

As I prepare to go rustic camping for a week in the beautiful Laurentian mountains (i.e. no electricity or running water and I have to schlep my stuff almost a half a kilometre to my site), my friends have been snickering at me because my book bag is almost as large as my food and clothing bags. They're assuming that I am toting around all the latest in brain candy a la Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz, Sherrilyn Kenyon etc. However, if they had been able to take a peek in my admittedly bulging black nylon bookbag, they would be surprised -- it is holding as much brain food as candy.

So what am I bringing with me to read under the blue skies, pine and birch trees and sparkling waters of Lake Monroe? Here's a small crosscut:

Dilemmas of the American Self by John Hewitt
Hewitt is my new favourite symbolic interactionist. His view is more pessimistic than the classic SI theorists and his idea of juggling constructed identities through strategies of self construction make sense to me from the excerpted chapters I've read. I look forward to seeing how it ties together into a coherent unified theory.

The Internet Galaxy by Manuel Castells
I've read bits and drabs of this, of course. No self-respecting digital culture academic can ignore it. I've never taken the time to read it in its entirety though. I hope to do so this week.

Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson
His latest book is one I've been waiting to read as he tends to take a rather positive approach to Western popular culture, while still managing to be analytically critical. This book in particular interests me because it deals with an issue that I know several digital game researchers have to confront daily - the perceived idea that video games are bad for us and bad for humanity overall. I look forward to seeing how he constructs the alternate argument.

What Just Happened? by James Glick
Got this in the remainders discount bin through Indigo. It goes over the beginnings of info tech and its strange laissez-faire attitude with software defects (aka "bugs"). While it may rehash much that I already knew, I hope to glean some new insights. And yes this book might straddle the divide between food and candy.

It is my hope that I get to read a few of these, though even I, fast-reader that I am, cannot hope to read all 30 of the books I've brought. But better feast than famine when on vacation, hmmm?

I leave today, so I'll be silent here for a week. I'll post again upon my return and let you know how I did, and what the balance between brain food and brain candy actually ended up being.

What I'm doing on my summer vacation

Exams are over until Thanksgiving. The sun is shining and I'm wearing flipflops and a tank top. It is summer and I'm on vacation.

Big deal, you say? Well, actually, for me, yes. As I've been telling all and sundry in the last few weeks, this summer will be the first summer I've had footloose and free since the late 70s. No job, no school, no schedule. Just 8 glorious weeks of hanging by the pool, reading and chilling.

Well, that's the plan anyway. As it has shaped up so far, I've actually not read much and have been busy visiting friends, planning my Laurentians camping trip (starts next week) and trying to figure out what, if anything, I need to cram for in order to do well on the GREs. For my Canadian pals who read this, the GRE is the exam you have to write in order to get into U.S. grad schools. Georgetown won't take me without it.

My plan for the summer, then, is to camp, read digital culture books that I've been meaning to get to, read scifi and fantasy novels, and indulge in some eBaying. Oh and slathering on the sunscreen too, of course.

I may or may not be posting much here, as a result. It will depend on whether or not the ideas I find in my reading feel appropriate for this space.

Have a great summer!

Gadget geek gear

I'm always on the lookout for new and cool geek gadgets. So the Thump from Oakley caught my eye. It's a mean combo of an MP3 player and Matrix-y frames and shades.

Now if only it was co-marketed with an Ipod instead of a generic player...

Who am I trying to kid? I am drooling anyway. They are fierce!

Aware of what I'm unaware

As I spend this muggy, sunny Sunday re-reading a selection of high canon sociological theory, from Emile Durkheim to Karl Marx, Max Weber to George Herbert Mead and not-yet-canonical John Hewitt to add modern-day spice, I realize that each time I approach their theories with a specific question in mind, I find a slightly new item to add to my answer. I am attempting to distill the main thoughts of this bunch down into 250 words each to regurgitate on a final exam tomorrow.

Marx for marks. Again.

So in a fine fit of academic procrastination, I started wandering the web and came across this article about Habermas, yet another almost canonical theorist that I have yet to read. It made me want to correct that oversight, though, rather than continuously plumbing the depths of the same 6 theorists yet again.

And so there are days when I'm more painfully aware that there is so much yet in social, philosophical and political theory that I have yet to read. Days when I realize that, seemingly voracious reader that I purport to be, my entire corpus of reading seems to be but a small ripple in the ocean of thought that is out there.

This is one of those days.

Another scholarly blog?

Found an interesting new site today. It isn't yet a blog per se, though it calls itself one. but it is new and may well become noteworthy and worth a daily browsing. It's called BlogScholar. Check it out.

[found via the Society of Applied Sociology mailing list]

Sociologists are dangerous!?!

A bunch of well-respected conservatives (probably in the US) were asked by an online conservative magazine to write down what books are the most dangerous to humanity, and they then voted on the compiled list.

The list of the most dangerous books ever published should make sociologists everywhere feel rather targeted - the top 10 list includes works from Auguste Comte, the acknowledged father of sociology and Karl Marx, the obvious founder of the conflict approach.

Reading through the rest of the list, I know I'm feeling rather racy by their standards, as I've read at least large excerpts from approximately 80% of the list.
[found via the Applied Sociologists mailing list]

D&D Online questions

Over the years, I've known many an individual who would list Dungeons and Dragons as one of their major or minor hobbies. So I have a passing familiarity with how that particular and somewhat unique style of tabletop gaming works. I have had occasion to watch weekends worth of gameplay and have noticed the social interactions that occurs fluidly throughout, as the gamers manage their game roles and outside selves seamlessly.

Now, Wizards of the Coast, the owners of the D&D franchise, are in the final stages of delivering an MMPORPG that is supposed to be true to the tabletop game. In a discussion with Kelly about this last night, I enthused that it will be an interesting study to see how it gets integrated into the habits and hobbies and affections of hardcore D&Ders who've managed until now to abstain from MMOs, even those rather blatantly based on the game. Kelly rightly brought me down to earth and pointed out that the game universe may well be doomed to failure and ultimately to strong disappointment or disapproval from tabletoppers because the game is anticipated to be one of the next big releases, causing existing online gamers to flock to it in droves, bringing along with them their blithe and open disregard for the traditions of D&D itself, looking only for an immersive gameplay experience that replicates and conforms to existing MMO conventions. We both wondered also to which market Wizards of the Coast will market - their existing rabidly loyal tabletopper base or the arguably larger online gamer base?

In thinking more about this today while reading a political science piece on the elite engineered political movements in Europe, it got me thinking about the whole concept of the "elites" as it will/would apply to D&D Online. Certainly the existing tabletop gamers, some who have played conventional D&D for as long as 30 years now, will have definite expectations too of the game and will consider themselves the "real" or "true" elite. When they meet the online gamers, many of whom come from a completely different gaming tradition completely tied to computer games, goals and values and identities will clash. Both will see themselves as the "true" elite. According to my readings, any power clash of elites will return as the winner the group that is best equipped materially and culturally to handle the power presented. But in this new MMO, that power is nebulous and still undefined. And in a digital universe, what could be considered the material or culture that is best suited to this game? With dual claims to elite status probably coming from both sides, it will be up to Wizards to manage the schism and unite the world, a daunting task.

Teens do the darndest....

File this one under S for stupidity or B for brashness...not sure which.

CNN reports two british teens are in critical condition after trying to create homemade light sabres using flourescent light tubes and "petrol". They were filming the stunt when they lit the tubes and one of them blew up.

Competition or cooperation?

While taking a break from studying Canadian constitutional politics and the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms (POLI 204 exam tomorrow worth 30% eek!) I was meandering the net, looking up info on my latest board game obsession, Settlers of Catan.

Found this editorial on the Games Journal -- it's about raising children to be gamers and thought its take on whether or not kids should play competitive games interesting. I know some of my fellow GameCODE-ers are interested in just this issue when looking at digital games.

Mobile blogging

First files, then pictures, now Blogger through its parent company Google is letting bloggers blog using mobile devices.

Nuances of the digital divide debate

While I too am occasionally guilty of going a bit binary in arguments or ideas I put forth here, generally I strive to be more thoughtful and less absolute when addressing issues of interest to me.

One such interest is the entire concept of the digital divide. The problem with the way it is normally addressed is that it is presented as a have/have-not debate, with little gray area or conceptualization of reasoned thinking.

So it was with a sigh of relief that I read this interview in the Digital Divide Network. Finally, a more careful and nuanced view.

Summer session 2005

A thrill of foreshadowing tickled the back of my neck this afternoon as I drove onto the island of Montreal and headed down the Decarie expressway towards downtown. Sun was out, spring finally felt present and I was heading to class.

Okay okay so that doesn't sound necessarily special, but to me it was. You see, I had taken the afternoon off to go to the first of my summer session classes. And they aren't night classes. I'm taking classes in the afternoon for the first time in a very very long time. I only have 4 more days of work to do before I turn into a full-time academic with no other gig to support me. But my thoughts yesterday were turned towards the idea of being in class during daylight hours, of feeling the vibes and energy that is so different on campus during the day.

As it turned out, the vibe and energy were definitely missing. Things were quieter than I had expected. Several of the on-campus concessionaires and cafes were closed up for the season and the students I saw all looked relaxed and unharried.

Still, there I was, on campus, in the middle of a weekday.

I have four classes in total during this six week summer semster, but with two of them being online courses, that leaves me to to attend in person. One is a sociology course on Social Change which looks like it will be fun and illuminating (studying Weber and Cooley and Mead - how can it be bad?) and the other is another political science course, this time an introduction to Canadian politics.

That latter course showed me once again how absolute people can be when making arguments. I heard all kinds of wild accusations and theories, which, if they had been presented as possibilities, would have been fine. But when they're presented as an absolute fact, as indisputable and self-evident, there I have problems with it. I tried to help the prof shift the debate to more nuanced areas of power and agency and the Canadian context, but the rest of the class kept dragging the discussion into a binary debate on the "goodness" or "badness" of Canadian politics and politicians vis-a- vis Quebec and the US.

When class ended around 4:00, I exited, climbed down the four flights of stairs from the Hall building to emerge into the sunlight. Wow. Sunlight. After class. What a novel concept.

Sunlight and nothing scheduled for me, other than eating dinner and reading political and social theory.

I could get used to this.

Letters from Canada

I wonder sometimes at what it would be like to study someplace that isn't Canada, in which the first language isn't English and few people speak either of my languages (the other being French).

I also wonder what others truly think of Canadians, others being non-North Americans, of course.

New culture, new ideas. The need to adapt. How does it make you grow as a person?

Canada's International Student of the Year Award submissions gave me a taste of what it would be like in reverse, if I weren't Canadian and yet had come to this huge country to study. I smiled and shed a few tears as I read the submissions.

Research process

Since I'm about to finish my last exam of the semester and start into the heavy research phase for my Alley Talk paper for HICSS, I started refreshing my memory on the research process, per what I learned in one of my classes last semester.

Seems I'm not the only one doing this - much talk about this on the AoIR list lately, which yielded this excellent overview of a good and manageable research process for the social sciences. Yes it is one person's account of how he does research, but I find it to be fairly solid.

Academic career greenlighted

April has been an odd month, full of trials and tribulations.

I will stop working for big Pharma next month and will start concentrating solely on my academic advancement and career. I've waited for this for a long time and it seems the day is fast approaching.

Also, to my shock, awe and no small amount of nervousness, my paper "Fear, Risk in the Digital Anomaly" got accepted to the Association of Internet Researcher's annual conference "Internet Research 6.0: Internet Generations" in Chicago in the fall!

Here I am in the listings and here's the abstract that I submitted.

Luckily the paper itself is already written, as I'm taking four courses in May and June so I expect to be up to my ears in writing for sociology and poli sci courses.

As I mentioned here a few weeks back, I'm also working on a paper for the HICSS annual conference in Hawaii in January 2006 - my abstract got accepted there too. Deadline for it is June 15 and my ethnography is barely started. Eeps!

The next 12 months will be very busy and hopefully rewarding.

Gaming for education

The UN has entered the gaming fray with an online Flash-based game designed to teach youth about world hunger. In this video game, hunger is the enemy and the air workers have to get food to the masses on a fictional island in order to vanguish it.

Conference submission prank

In an attempt to highlight how many conferences are setup these days in the name of money rather than furthering research and understanding, three studentsfrom MIT got together and wrote a computer program that generates a "research" paper based on random but contextual grammatical sentences. While it may sound far-fetched, they succeeded in getting a paper accepted to a supposedly academic-oriented technology conference.

Think Media program

So what about Switzerland for graduate studies? The Alps? This program and its faculty reads like a who's who of digital culture.

Digital Culture reading list

Now this is a digital culture reading list! wow!

Sociolinguistics of texting

While doing searches this evening for graduate programs in digital culture studies, I stumbled across this essay on the sociolinguistics of youth texting. As it might play into a paper I'm working on for a conference, it is useful to have around.

HICSS conference submission

I submitted an abstract to the HICSS conferencefor the Persistent Conversation minitrack and got accepted. Hawaii in January - good. Not knowing what awaits me there in terms of audience and slant- not so good. This is far from being a purely sociological audience.

I do hope I get into this AIR conference in October based on my Fear & Risk paper, so that I have at least one under my belt that is more purely digital research before doing HICSS.

Funny that I'm nervous a bit. I've done presentations weekly for the last 10 years on a whole range of topics, with large and small groups, executives and students alike. I would normally tell you that I'm just fine with public speaking, no stage fright, no maam, not me. But this one intimidates me a bit - I admit I didn't expect to get accepted.

Now I have to write the paper and it's due June 15. What's that hoary saying? Nothing hurts like success? I'm feeling the success.

Another addition to the digital fear rhetoric

Wonder what my gameCODE pals would think of this latest intiative by a big-shot US politician to reduce or eliminate violence in video games and apparently save their oh-so-impressionable youth?

Don't these politicians read the academic thinking and research on these topics? Or do they just act on their gut instincts?

I find it laughably sad. Do we hear about the violence, blood, gore and realism we see in the movies and on television? Not anymore. Video games seem to be the new favourite whipping boy of the media and politicians. More digital fear rhetoric.

Happy bunny day

To celebrate this weekend of bunnies and rabbits, pastels and baskets, chocolate eggs and brightly coloured jellybeans, here's a little hip-hopping cheer for you.

Happy Easter to you and yours!
[found via a favourite friendly mailing list]

Creating public spaces for collaboration

Some of my fellow students have been introducing me via email in the apparently ongoing debate about how much of the academic research process should be publicly accessible by any interested in the topic. The argument for the idea is that there is more to research than the finished polished product and so the actual process itself should be observable by the public.

While I agree that it can work, it usually requires the controlled space of something like the Wikipedia. When those types of social networks are absent, as they usually are in smaller scale academic research teams, disastrous results can occur. This group's public Wiki is a sad example of what happens when you attempt to put this high-minded ideal into practice.

This isn't the first time I've seen this happen. It makes me wonder what the actual benefit is to the public of areas like this. From what I've seen, they force the research group in question to play vigilant content cop and janitor, when they should be focused on thought creation and group collaboration.

Game economies get real

Were I to join Kelly's world by getting heavily into game studies as an academic career, this is one of the topics I'd look into - how does the ability to buy your way to success in the explicit goals of the game affect the tacit goals (i.e. sociability)? Microsoft seems to believe it doesn't matter if it affects those tacit ones so long as they're making money off of it.

Internet = medium?

While I don't always agree with Internet Week editor Antone Gonsalves, I do enjoy reading his takes on life in the wires. His most recent editorial nails down part of a phenomenon that people are ignoring among the blare of the trumpets heralding the wonders of the wired age. He points out that though Americans are getting more and more of their political news and information electronically, they are starting to treat the Internet more as a medium than as a place or space in which to get informed. As access to the net becomes conversely unwired through the use of Blackberries, cellphones, wireless laptops, etc, he asserts that people are using it more as a tool than ever before.

Anyone who reads this space of mine regularly knows what I think of this concept and it is becoming a prevailing one as even academics seem to be striving to continue this articulation of a binary opposition between the so-called "real" and the "virtual", between the "actual" and the "digital". I see Antone's opinion as falling into this line, because after all, his employer is all about broadcasting infromation, no matter how interactive they think they when they provide their email addresses so that readers may give feedback.

Even that term, readers, is telling. Are we readers? Something to think about.

Richness of silence

In between reading my sociology stats and my intro to politics textbooks, I've been reading a collection of excellent short stories called The Ivory and the Horn by the acclaimed Canadian urban fantasy writer, Charles de Lint. One of the things I enjoy about de Lint is his evocative style of writing about the mythic and the mundane. His style moves between various voices that are each lyrical, poetic or snappy in turn.

But one passage in the last quarter of this book has drawn me back time and again and I can't stop thinking about it.

The best artists know what to leave out. They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren't necessary. They suggest, and let the viewer fill in whatever else is needed to make the communication complete. They aren't afraid to work with a smaller palette, to delete excess verbiage or place rests on the musical staff, for they know that almost every creative endeavor can be improved with a certain measure of understatement. For isn't it the silence between the notes that often gives music its resonance? What lies between the lines of a poem or store, the dialogue the actor doesn't speak, the pauses between the dancer's steps? The spaces can be just as important as what is distinctly portrayed.

In a world like ours that is filled up with information, activity, movement, purpose, I must remember this passage and remember to live as much in the richness of silence and absence as I do in the fullness of noise and bustle.

Happy birthday Yahoo

To celebrate their 10th birthday, Yahoo has put up a mosaic retrospective of 10 years in the life of the net. It's quite well done. Check it out.

Mass media musing

Bart from GameCODE sent out a link to this thought piece and I watched it with Kelly last night. While I found it interesting, I guess I don't find it that scary simply because we've set ourselves on this path already. Having been in communications and employee/business portal design and management in the last dozen years, I've looked often into that future to consider its ramifications. A few thoughts of mine....

The recommendation software that is out there hasn't changed all that much since 1994. I remember being agog with the concept of Amazon back then, when we were still using v2.0 of Netscape Navigator and trying to ignore the coming of Microsoft's own browser. The software is still almost as crude and is based on everything people buy, with no context. Thus, if I have a friend who is pregnant and has no credit card and I buy a book on pregnancy for her, for the next few months I will be deluged by Amazon with book recommendations about pregnancy, breast-feeding, child-rearing etc. I have no way of telling it that I have no interest in such books.

I find Epic no scarier actually than the idea of concentrating and consolidating all news, entertainment media and literary publishing in the hands of a few mega-conglomerates, an alternate path that is also already well under way. Truth is no more assured in that path than it is in the Epic style.

And the latter is perhaps scarier because the human tendency to not bother personalizing and to simply allow yourself to be spoon-fed information based on what someone else thinks you ought to know is well ingrained. Personalization systems and personalized "portals" were all the rage in IT in the mid-1990s but they never took off because they overestimated individuals' desire to be proactive about their information needs.

Who here remembers Open Sesame? Excite? The Globe.com? Exactly my point.

So, for me, the interesting thing under all of this is the power plays, the effects of such information dissemination tactics on our feelings of agency. But then again, I too may be guilty of overstating people's desire to have agency and individuality.

And ultimately it is that which I find the most scary.

February Frivolity

So it's been how long since I"ve posted here? My oh my I have been letting my piece of the I-space languish hmm? But if you were expecting my first post in ..oh...two months, to be an intensive thought piece on digital culture, I'm afraid I have to disabuse you of the notion. I'm in the mood to be frivolous so I'm posting a joke that I found on one of my favourite online communities, which shall remain nameless, given that this is supposed to be an academically-focused thought blog.

So enjoy this piece of February frivolity from yours truly. I'll try to get back to my regular serious self later next week after my statistics mid-term is over.

Having Mom over for Dinner

Brian Hester invited his mother over for dinner. During the course of the meal, Brian's mother couldn't help but keep noticing how beautiful Brian's roommate, Stephanie, was. Mrs. Hester had long been suspicious of a relationship between Brian and Stephanie, and this had only made her more curious.

Over the course of the evening, while watching the two react, Mrs. Hester started to wonder if there was more between Brian and Stephanie than met the eye. Reading his mom's thoughts, Brian volunteered, "I know what you must be thinking, but I assure you Stephanie and I are just roommates."

About a week later, Stephanie came to Brian saying, "Ever since your mother came to dinner, I've been unable to find the beautiful silver gravy ladle. You don't suppose she took it, do you?" Brian said, "Well, I doubt it, but I'll send her an e-mail just to be sure."

So he sat down and wrote:

Dear Mother: I'm not saying that you "did" take the gravy ladle from the house, I'm not saying that you "did not" take the gravy ladle. But the fact remains that one has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.

Love, Brian

Several days later, Brian received a letter from his mother that read:

Dear Son: I'm not saying that you "do" sleep with Stephanie, and I'm not saying that you "do not" sleep with Stephanie. But the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her own bed, she would have found the gravy ladle by now.

Love, Mom