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!
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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.