Blogging the Society for the Social Studies of Science conference (4s)
Once again, I'm breaking all of the blogging rules, and blogging my notes from 4s. I'm currently in a session moderated by danah boyd about youth and participatory culture.
Notes from Sarita Yardi's/Amy Bruckman's - trying to understand the problem with teens not being interested in science, technology and engineering fields. They're researching how SNS might be used to encourage interest in these fields.
Questions
(1) current practices of teenagers' online - interviews with 25 students in ATL area
(2) how these practices might be shaped to encourage teens to gain computational skills
Definitions of computing - expert based
What do you do on the computer?
- On all day, on Facebook, chatting with friends
- Internet not seen as influencing future careers
Fewer people wanted to be artists than computer programmers...
Computing (seen as hardware/software) is not the Internet (seen as fun).
Computing is antisocial - not people-centered.
Computing is hard.
Main takeaways:
(1) Teens should be taught computational literacy based on whatever they're already doing (like classes using Facebook's API).
(2) Teens represent the future of technology.
There's a range of computational literacy...
Narratives of Self-Teaching - What do children learn by participating from online/media cultures? (Patricia G. Lange, USC film)
Method: Ethnographic study of video podcasts, interviews, and participation in the YouTube
"Self-taught" - often used by community members as a way of distancing themselves from traditional, social learning resources
Narrative - Portelli 1991 - the structure of these narratives and inherent contradictions are important.
"Massaging public identity"
"Self-taught" is used to "portray a technical identity and competence" and distance oneself from certain social forms of learning.
Questions - one audience member suggested the "self-taught" stuff is very much tied to DIY/punk aesthetic. But of course, there are adjustments made to these cultures by those with "elite" status within the community.
Sonja Baumer - YouTube
(me: "Broadcast yourself" - an interesting tagline)
(1) Understanding tools for creating/sharing
(2) UX and motivation, and modes of production
(3) How do these different modes of participation support the culture of YouTube
Gaming aspects of YouTube - social points/scoreboards for attracting viewers, comments, etc.
Four types of motivations for using YouTube:
(1) Self-expression
(2) Self-promotion
(3) "Random" entertainment
(4) Interest driven
Modes of participation:
(1) "Expressives"
(2) "Fame seekers"
(3) "Casual Users"
(4) "Enthusiasts"
More than a Web app - "a community of users"
"Composed conversations - teenage practices of flirting with new media," Christo Sims - UC Berkeley
Mediated practices used:
(1) attempt to figure out whether romantic attraction is shared
(2) mitigate the possibility that they lose face in a more "private" sphere
Ellison, Heino, and Gibbs (2006) - use Goffman to understand the impression management practices of adults on personal sites
Social information processing theory - Walther (1992) - supported by Sims' work
Flirting is conducted through asynchronous/synchronous writing - comments on public sites or over IM - participants felt they had "more control" over their presentation of self. This would precede F2F meetings. Rejection is relatively non-confrontational and allows individuals to save face more easily.
Individual messages should be interpretable in multiple ways - and short. This means that individuals scrutinize small cues. This also means that those producing comments spend a lot of time projecting a "casual" attitude.
There's also tensions between the perceived privacy allowed by online flirting, but there's also a significant amount of surveillance that can occur, as individuals share these flirtations with their friends, even composing messages with others.
Mediating the Generation Gap - Heather A. Horst
Collaboration - commitment to values of equality, democracy, solidarity, cooperation, shift from hierarchical to lateral relations.
Are kids able to leverage their experience with technology to equalize the power relations within the family?
...more later - my battery just died...