Recently in academic stuff Category

Judy Wajcman - (Life in the Fast Lane - British Journal of Sociology) - straying from submitted abstract

Impact of mobile phones and new forms of social relations - two sides: perpetual contact (boo) or perpetual contact (yay!). The question is the permeability of work and play that these devices encourage - but Wajcman suggests that this is mostly a discursive trope. She's mostly interested in the idea of mobile phones as tools of coordination between family members and their practices.

"Family practices as mutually configured by mobile devices." The question is the transformative nature of these technologies.

Few researchers focus on the role of gender and mobile phones - unlike traditional landline-based studies (me: Claude Fischer's America's Calling.

Sample: 1000 households - time diary, survey, phone log. Calls on mobile are mainly for social/family reasons. Women's calls on mobile phones are predominantly social - even if you take into account employment status. People said that the mobiles were often used for coordination. Men were twice as likely as women to take their phones on vacation.

Interestingly, Wajcman found that people were able to control the boundaries between work and play - contrary to popular discourse around the blurring of these boundaries.

(me: Yikes, 1 hour for four papers is totally crazy....)

MOGI players - Christian Licoppe

GPS-enabled phones - players view a map on phone that shows collectable objects and other players. The idea is for Web-based players to guide mobile phone players in the field.

Location in this community becomes a public resource. "Unusual locations" become mentionable and often form the basis of interactions. There are also MOGI-specific form of greetings - not simply formulaic or void of meaning.

Of course, this has implications for studies of surveillance and privacy.

Making Work Public - Laura Foriano (Columbia U.)
(Thriving Office - CD for home businesses with sounds of business being conducted)

Wifi hotspots as mobile workspaces.

Some theories:
Ritual view of communication - Carey
ANT - Latour
Innovation Space -Moultrie

Foriano surveyed people with NYCwireless and Ile Sans Fils (Montreal) - also some responses from Budapest.

In NYC, top spaces: Starbucks, Bryant Park, NYC Public Library, and independent cafes.

Budapest, top spaces: Other/independent locations, McDonald's (McCafe), Burger King, etc.

Montreal: Other/independent locations are at the top.

Wifi is a reason for folks to visit these locations. People stay 1-4 hours and are typically there between 12-9pm. Many people want to get out of their home and office.

Interviewed with various people - one was an SEO.

Feeling of being in a public space (surveillance) makes them feel more productive.

Paper forthcoming in Mobile Work and Technology.

Cultivating memory - enhancing the human with mobile recording devices - Lina Dib (Rice U.)
CARPE (digital computer systems that can supplement the human memory)

"What counts as remembering?" - archiving, rather than deleting

(me: again, my battery is dying. great session, though.)

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...

I'm officially a PhD, as I passed my defense on June 1 and filed my dissertation (with minimal edits) on June 8. It's strange to be done. Mostly nice. But definitely strange.

ANYWAY, I've been spending much of my time catching up on the pop culture I've been missing the last few months (and visiting sites like this) and relaxing. I'm going to be restarting my freelance UI/UX/usability consulting business again, and I'm also planning on redesigning and refocusing this blog to focus on sustainable interface design. Of course, I'm still going to have to post the odd photographic find and/or pithy commentary every now and then.

More to come...

First draft = 68,378 words = 1,503 paragraphs = text + 4 tables + 10 figures + 10 appendices + bibliography + abstract = 225 pages

typeface (headers): GoudySans 12, 16, 14, and 18 pt
typeface (body): Garamond 12 pt
1.5 line spacing

The conclusion is totally messy and incomplete right now. But, yes, a first draft of the dissertation is complete and has been sent to my advisor.

Sigh. It's been a tough week. I'm officially halfway through my dissertation draft (4 chapters in draft form), but it feels like I'm just barely keeping afloat.

So, I turned to one of my "helpful" dissertation books to find the following diagram.

I'm now adding "despondent" to the "three Ds" Sternberg describes in his book, "How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation."

Crispin Thurlow
Thurlow is interested differences between the rich and the very rich - in the context of the large amount of poverty in the world. But what we're buying is semiotic. We're paying for an intensely-semoticized experience. He's interested in the ways language, discourse, and visual communication are used to represent the world in unequal ways.

This happens in two areas:
In talking to young individuals' use of language
Global mobility and the super-elite and how the world has been reorganized around them

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) rises out of sociolinguistics, but is also interested in the Foucauldian discourses. It's fundamentally empirical, and interested in how microtexts links to macro discourses. CDA scholars are interested into looking at the production of texts. Thurlow suggests his work as discourse ethnography.

Kate Dunsmore
Who gets to say what and in what circumstances? What are the political and economic consequences of this? Dunsmore is currently looking at national discourse between Canada and the US. She's interested in the ways our official speech and media coverage tell us what countries can and can't do? Edelman (draws on Foucault, Burke, and Derrida) is one scholar she finds particularly useful. She's done interviews, participant observation, mostly qualitative work.

She suggested working in multiple stages including deep immersion reading, and then using Atlas.ti for word occurance and KWIC (keyword in context).

Jamie Moshin
There are two major camps: rhetorical critics (doing more interpretative work) and those who would call themselves critical rhetorians (doing more critical work). A rhetorican can find themselves doing either of things, however. He in interested in the intertwining of method and theory. Moshin argues that text and people are sometimes indivisible. He's working currently on Matisyahu, and is very interested in the creation/representation of Jewish identity. His work is deeply reflexive. He worked on the represenation of Jewish identity in humourous films about the Holocaust - he generally studies popular culture.

Moshin tends to avoid the standard rhetorical tropes of ethos and metaphor, in favor of modern theoretical frameworks: naming, passing, etc.

Giorgia Aiello
Her dissertation is the visual construction of European identity (the integrated EU). Aiello's work is rooted in Barthes' semiotic work - the ideas that images are really powerful, and her dissertation draws on social semiotics. It sees texts as doing semiotic work; they are dynamic and create fields of meaning potentials. What social conventions stand behind the texts?

Text/context - but all semiotic work needs to be rooted in the political economy/production issues. In doing a social semiotic analysis, she takes three main steps:

• Descriptive - syntax of the text, and the form and the semiotic resources
  
• Interpretive - exploring the context (interviewing curators, image makers, etc.)
  
• Critical - critique of/question these texts

Q&A
There's a lot of talk of theory (good, bad, other?) - what is the role of theory? Crispin suggests that this almost sounds like a sort of anti-intellectual move of the right. As Kate pointed out, Foucault discusses the nature of disciplines as restricting certain ways of talking/thinking - this means that we might be somewhat suspicious of "theory" as a mode of separating our work artificially.

Crispin mentioned that we need to consider the specific claims that producers of texts make. What about situations in which the author of the text is a marginalized voice?

Other questions: How do we engage the communities with which we study? What about questions of class?

Where we've been:

• power (what/when/where it is?)
  
• economy
  
• politics
  
• inequality
  
• social justice
  
• public scholarship
  
• action research/resistance/change
  
• data (what, when is it?)
  
• issue (what constitutes it?)
  
• reflexivity (when is enough?)
  
• context (when is enough?)
  
• situated history
  
• production/reception

Maybe it's a degree thing - perhaps, we look for more of this in the critical arena.

Ralina Joseph
Talked about her experience as a ethnic studies scholar, and the role of "packaging" herself within communication. UCSD ethnic studies program explored the constructed nature of these categories - questions of power and inequality have to be central. Not essentializing is critical here. Interdisciplinary - multiple modes of inquiry.

She noted the difficulty of using the term "methodologies" when discussing cultural studies work. Communication departments are really into the issue of method in order for work to be valid. Cultural studies was rooted in the Birmingham School - explicitly political, radical, and interested in social reconstruction.

Methods for cultural studies:

• Textual analysis (interpretative or content analysis) - semiotics, ideological analyses, Marxist approach - get beneath the surface the dennotative to explore the connotative. Sees culture as a series of narratives, and texts become cultural artifacts - linking to dominant discourses in society. Texts create identities and subject positions for readers. Joseph suggests she works within the interpretative analysis tradition.
  
• Political economy - cultural studies is deeply rooted in this area. Analyzing the means of production, who's financing the show, the underwriters, etc.
  
• Audience reception - watching people interact with a text to understand their responses.

Recommended (Representation, ed. by Stuart Hall, and Angela McRobbie's The Uses of Cultural Studies)

Madhavi Murty
(Eek! I missed half of this presentation because I was handing off graded papers...thus it's incomplete.)

Murty is interested in subject formation and spaces of resistance - examining the texts (autobiography), films, mainstream media and how the construct and commodify certain subjects within Indian culture.

Theory and method might be intertwined (Foucault, Hall, Gramsci, and work from Black cultural studies) - see texts as constituting the political and the social. Like Giorgia, she mentioned that no one considered her a critical/cultural scholar until coming to the US. Mentioned Leah Fernandez(?) - South Asian studies, political scientist who studied the jute mill workers in India.

Interested in how we categorize and reify certain categories of knowing.

Fahed Al-Sumait
Interested in issues between the Middle East and the West (broadly speaking). Issues in this arena inherently speak to a critical perspective. Al-Sumait's thesis concerned issues of media use/consumption and their influence on stereotypes of the Middle East.

There are not a lot of scholars looking at exactly the same sort of area that he's working within. However, issues of power and representation always come into play into his work. As far as epistemological and methodological approaches, he's most interested in mixing methods to illuminate his research interests. In Kuwait, Al-Sumait is often asked about his background. In the US it's the name that "gives him away" - in both cases, issues of identity are foregrounded.

Rebecca Clark
Clark is a "self-consciously" critical scholar. She's interested in issues of subjectivity and the constructed nature of identity. Her current work focuses on white hip hop (as represented by Fergie and Gwen Stefani). Clark is interested in how white feminist moves might reinscribe whiteness. The issue here is that it is possible for these individuals to be both resistive and hegemonic at the same time. Her thesis was on white masculinity built into hip hop crossover stars.

Clark sees herself as a postcolonial scholar, which she views as crossing boundaries of all sorts (bringing in issues of gender, sexuality, knowledge/power regime, etc.) Her background is in critical rhetoric - the aim here is to unmask discourse of power.

Q&A
Crispin mentioned that the narrative around labels and hierarchy is lame, but we know they're part of the academy right now. But it's a tremendous privilege to be able to even complain about labels.

Tema mentioned that she thinks the exciting place is where tensions happen at once: where people can talk about whales, for example, by saying, "what a great show." This both reinscribes a paradigm where nature "performs" for humans and yet, is also maybe the only way for us to really show our appreciation for the human/non-human boundary.

Exclusionary practices within the scholarship of this area - Gina suggested that there's an affinity for famous scholars right now. How do people get to be the "superstars"? Kate noted that there can be some really positive things about having folks who can reach out beyond the academy.

This brings up issues of politics and writing. Deborah Cameron authored an article where she said we're moving from ethical work to advocacy, but then the critical move is empowerment (doing work with people).

Crispin Thurlow
What does critical mean? (theoretical, methodological, object of study)
Everyone can have a different perspective on this... Points of departure - rhetorical, discourse, and cultural studies (maybe this is a useful way of mapping the terrain)
Commonalities - spun by one of two turns:

• ethnographic - focuses on the local and idiosyncratic
  
• discursive - social construction of the world; material life
  
• or not?
  

We're all about interdisciplinary work who are attending.Most people here are interested in popular culture, but this isn't the only thing going on. Issues - community, identity, etc., as processional notions.

Crispin handed out some great handouts on critical theory. These talked about the critical literary theory (Richter - The Critical Tradition) and critical *social* theory (Frankfurt School - Marxist, post-Marxist, etc.). The second handout had a super family tree of critical theory (which I just posted at Flickr). Crispin suggests that there's a move beyond the post-modernist to the "neo-Marxist" traditions in feminist, queer, and post-colonial theory.

Gina Neff
Neff is interested in critical approaches to organizations and technology. Her work is not discursive, rhetorical, or even critical. Within organizational communication there's a central focus on the role of power.

Areas of interest:

1. Overarching shifts in capitalism in the "new economy" - wants to understand the relationship between local practice and global structure (and how do we connect the shifting nature of power between the "individual" and the "organization" and larger macro-structures
   
2. What voices have access to the creation of technology? Who creates the structures/affordances within technology?
   
3. Power structures within organizations - Neff suggests this is most clearly identified with critical organizational communication.

Very easy to do interdisciplinary work -- very hard to do it well. How do we work within these constraints as critical scholars? How do we frame our work (in intelligable terms) and join the conversations productively.

We should start with the questions and then figure out the tools we need to answer those questions. We do need to provide evidence and argumentation that convinces other academics. (Meta comment: what about others outside the academy?)

Tema Milstein
How do we construct certain ways of "knowing" about the environment? How do these discourses play out? Milstein mentioned a number of ways this is being considered from areas like ecofeminism, science studies, ecopsychology, and environmental justice. Understanding the ways that nature is "constructed" becomes the focus of critical theory in this area. Environmental Communication Yearbook is the place where this is happening.

Milstein's dissertation concerns whale watching. She has conducted fieldwork in the San Juan Islands. She hopes to illuminate the dialogical nature of the communication between humans and whales. Symbolic construction of brochures/web sites around whale watching.

Deb Kaplan
Kaplan is interested in the following:

1. Neoliberal discourse of social inequality
   
2. How does the media define global poverty?
   
3. Where is there resistance?

A couple of current studies:
Case study: how homeless camp and local newspaper discuss the changing nature of the homeless within AZ

Tent cities as a beginning of a "grassroots" - uses Maluchi's framework of semiotics, so tent cities would be seen as "signs"

New economy as a discourse - suppresses the new economy's poverty turn of welfare from a universal social provision to a social disease/inner pathology.

Kaplan chooses not to label her work, but hopes to achieve some sense of the contextuality of these serious issues. Tries to take questions from the social world - and how these questions play out in the real world. Kaplan uses a grounded theory approach to understand these issues.

Leah Sprain
"I make critical movees, but a critical approach does not guide my interpreations or research questions." Sprain doesn't go to critical theory to interpret actions within social justice movements. Ethnography of communication - there's a commitment to doing cross-cultural analysis. She's a close reader of texts, drawing on theory secondarily after exploring the texts themselves.

Can enthnographers of communication be critical? There is a lot of debate here - one criticism might be that researchers would look for things there that might not be seen by the participants themselves. Selecting and taking seriously those who are marginalized may be one way ethnographers of communication actually make a critical move. The big issue is do you move to interpreting participant meanings to saying they're "good" or "bad."

Panel 1 Q&A
Can you go into research without theory? Giorgia suggested that we can "read" culture or "read" texts is actually a critical move. Deb suggested that we need to "discipline" the theoretical so we can actually "discover" something. The discovery makes the whole enterprise worthwhile - and Neff added that makes it research.

Ralina argued that often theory and criticism are conflated. She suggested this might be part of the "disabling" effects of high theory ("What Celi knows you should know" - Barbara Cristensan). (Meta: this reminds me of Nakamura's article in Critical Cyberculture Studies.)

(Meta: What about reflexivity? Can we deconstruct our thoughts to the point of ridiculousness?) Reflexivity as "bias"? Researcher's positionality within the research - not biases/limitations. Ralina suggested historicizing and acknowlogizing subject position (she suggested "Racing research - resarching race").

What is considered research? Does it have to be the idea that results are generalizable?

Crispin argued that part of critical theory is its openness to being clear about where we're coming from and how we're engaging theory. We categorize and create themes - we generate the data we're investigating.

Let me first start by making the following disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about sound editing. However, I happened to find myself in a situation recently in which I had a fairly distorted and echo-y recording of one of my dissertation interviews, making transcription an absolute bear. After messing with the settings in Windows Media Player, I finally came up with the bright idea to check online for some simple (and cheap!) sound mixing software. I found Audacity, a free, open-source editing tool that has a decent UI (as these things go) and lots of great one-click filters that managed to salvage an almost unusable and hissy recording.

Yay for open source!

Wow, I'm pretty sure that Lisa Nakamura would have a field day with the cover for Mobile Interaction Design, a new book about interactive design for cellphones and PDAs.

The IA Institute's IDEA 2006, a conference happening at the Seattle Public Library in October, has just finalized its program. The line-up looks pretty good, and it includes folks like Peter Merholz, Bruce Sterling, and Alison Sant.

Discount registration pricing has been extended until September 15th. If you're going to be in the area, I highly recommend attending.

Disturbing news regarding academic freedom in Iran - the president is calling for liberal and secular teachers to be removed. While doing a bit of research into issues of academic fredom, I just ran across the Students for Academic Freedom site (ranked #3 when searching for academic freedom). Stupidly thinking the site represented students who were interested in infringements on their professors' speech rights, I was stunned to find this:

The Students for Academic Freedom Information Center is a clearing house and communications center for a national coalition of student organizations whose goal is to end the political abuse of the university and to restore integrity to the academic mission as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge.

Since when has the academy ever stood for the "disinterested pursuit of knowledge?" I can't imagine how boring it be for both students and teachers if we were only allowed to pursue research in which we had little/no investment or personal interest. To suggest that the university would benefit from eliminating all passion, controversy, or creativity is horrifying.

Clay Spinuzzi has a thoughtful and provocative posting about the possibilities of those who are researched presenting their own version of events using mobile technologies.

He notes:

Right now IRBs assume the traditional asymmetrical relationship between researcher and participants, and thus they layer on protections for participants, the vulnerable side of the equation. As participants start treating researchers like journalists, IRBs will have to deal with this "terrifying nightmare" by developing reciprocal protections. And researchers will have to start dealing with issues such as multiplicity and representation in earnest.

Perhaps the power differential between researchers and those who participate (either knowingly or unknowingly) is shifting. It's going to be intriguing to see how this evolves and how IRBs respond.
 

While the location is still TBD, I am going to be moving back to Seattle mid-September and staying until March 2007 (when the dissertation will hopefully be done). If you've got a small studio or mother-in-law apartment that's sitting vacant between now and then, please send me an email, as I'm still looking for my new home. I also have a new number, which for obvious reasons, I'm not posting here. Drop me a line if you'd like to know what it is.

Critical Cyberculture Studies is now available at Amazon. I just hope we don't end up with a review like this:

"Citizen Kane is a hymn to all filmmakers who have ever tried to create something artistic and meaningful and failed miserably every step of the way."

Read more Amazon.com hilarity at Waxy.org.
 

Just change the word "novel" to "dissertation" in this series of clips from Family Guy, and you've pretty much summed up my current situation.

Warning: This post is extremely geeky and futher cements my place in the world as a geek grrl, not just a grrl who's happened to date some geeky guys. So, if you're uninterested in games, World of Warcraft (WOW), politics, or gnomes, you might want to skip this. (Of course, Dave Chappelle apparently likes WOW, so maybe it's gained some hipster cred. Whatever.)

At night, after a long day of teaching, dissertating and/or reading tomes like this or this, I often log on to WOW and complete a few quests involving: 1) transporting item "a" to place "b;" 2) killing boss "c" for loot "d" so NPC "e" can make potion "f;" 3) hitting peons on the head with a bat so they'll get back to work. Usually, I'll end the evening by flying back to one of the cities and selling off all of the useless crap that animals in the game carry around despite having no pockets or opposable thumbs.

I enjoy these evenings of mindless stealthing (I play a rogue) and socializing (A usually plays with me). I'm not a big socialite in or out of the game, but I have been enjoying the intelligent and engaging conversation that takes place in the guild to which we belong (TerrorNova). Guild conversations often revolve around the ethical issues of gaming research (many of its members are academics who work in/with virtual worlds), and I have found my guildmates to be generous and supportive of newbies like me to a fault.

So, what's the problem? Why am I posting at all if life in WOW is so hunky-dory?

I play on a PVP server. PVP, for the unintiated, stands for "player vs. player," and it means that characters representing the other faction (the Alliance) - who are at war with the Horde for mysterious reasons that I suspect have more to do with the marketability of Warcraft than with differences outlined in the game's sketchy mythology - can kill me and my Horde brethren.

Happier days on a non-PVP server - Skador and Arendt

Now, what's so bad about this, you ask? Well, it just so happens that Blizzard's poor implementation of the PVP system means that level 60 characters can: 1) kill a bunch of Horde characters having a funeral for a fellow friend who died in "real" life without penalty; and 2) hang out in areas where lower characters are questing and kill them repeatedly (which is called "ganking" or "griefing"), again without penalty. In WOW, there are things called "honorable" and "dishonorable" kills - the former is reserved for player characters who are at or above your skill level; the latter is for lower-level player kills. At the end of the day/week, players are ranked according to their honorable kills and win...absolutely nothing, except the right to run around and tell everyone that they've killed the most Alliance or Horde players.

I guess this system is set up so you're supposed to feel bad if you're a 60th level priest (which means, essentially, that you're invincible to all but the biggest and baddest in Azeroth), and you kill a puny level 30 hunter with one hit.

I say supposed to, because as far as I can tell, the honorable/dishonorable kills thing means nothing. As far as I can tell, PVP attracts a certain level of, shall we say, immaturity, where high level characters have no problem camping some newbie's corpse and killing her over and over again. Sometimes, they'll even gang up with each other to prove that the other faction knows who's boss, going on a killing spree that litters the countryside with dozens of skeletons.

You might be asking at this point, so what? I mean, who cares if people in this virtual world are killing each other - it's just a game, right?

To which I respond, no, it's not just a game. How many articles have to be written about the real world implications of online activities before players start realizing that there are PEOPLE attached to the characters you're killing?* Llokye (my female troll rogue) and Skador (my male dwarf hunter) may not be "real," but I've spent a lot of time in the game with them. I'm not really offended when they're killed (or kill) some boar or an NPC in the game because I know that those characters are computer controlled and that they exist in 1s and 0s only. I am, however, very annoyed and frustrated and freaked out when I log on for five minutes in a zone to complete the last part of a quest and get ganked four times in a row. The worst part of it is that I can't even communicate with my attacker, since the two factions don't speak the same language. So, I am, effectively, mute. And helpless. And dead. That's a bit too close for comfort for my tastes, given humanity's seemingly endless love affair with genocide and torture.

So, why would I be on a PVP server at all? Well, because of the guild, and because I had no idea what I was getting into. I just assumed that individuals on a PVP server would try to "kill honorably" (this is an oxymoron, I know, but go with me here).

I guess I can see the value in PVP, just not how Blizzard has implemented it. I mean, first-person shooters have a large portion of the gaming market, and I know that this is a for-profit affair. If players on PVP servers really want to fight each other, they should at least make it fair; a substantially higher level character should be penalized in some real way for killing a substantially lower level character. Right now it feels like there are a bunch of bullys roaming Azeroth, randomly killing other helpless players who are effectively gagged. And, I have no way to vocalize that I'm *not* a threat and that I'm *not* interested in fighting. The best I can do is use an emote like /dance or /hi and hope that my fellow players take pity on me.

All of this is to say that I wish there were some way to change servers so I didn't have to deal with this conflict. Seriously, I like Llokye, and I don't want to start all over again with a new character, but she's living in an imaginary world that is a bit too close to the "real" one - except there are no penalties for killing.

* Julian Dibbell's classic tale, A Rape in Cyberspace, is probably the most famous and relevant one in this case.

So, I've been in Vancouver since last Thursday (3/23) for the IA Summit, which is part of my dissertation research. It was a good conference - lots of interesting things going on in the IA field that I will be thinking more about during the next couple of weeks. I attended a bunch of different panels, including one on research in the IA field (side note: it's amazing how many people only consider quantitative work valuable), and connected up with some UW geography students and one of my committee members. I also conducted two of my expert interviews: one with Peter Morville and one with Keith Instone. Both gave extremely thoughtful answers to my questions, and I am lucky that the IA community is filled with such generous people who are willing to talk to a total stranger in such depth about the work they do. The conference was a great opportunity to meet people whose work I've admired for a long time. I'll be conducting a number of interviews (via Skype or phone) over the next few weeks with some other folks who presented at the Summit.

I arrived early for the conference so I could enjoy a bit of the Pacific NW. I was reminded, again, of how much I miss this place, and how wonderful Vancouver is. I spent some time shopping on Main St. (between 12th and 24th), an area that reminds a bit of Capitol Hill and parts of Toronto. There are great coffee shops, cafes, ethnic groceries, amazing restaurants, vintage stores, and comic book shops in the area. I got a bunch of local zines at Lucky's and bought a bunch of other frivolous items at Voltage. I also ran on the seawall path along the water and gazed out at the beautiful mountains to the north. Sigh. I'm happy to be going home, but I really miss living in a (real) city.

A let me know about the horrible stuff that happened on Saturday in Capitol Hill. The Stranger has a very detailed article about the events. It's very weird, as I only lived four or five blocks from the crime scene. (via joygantic)

Oh, and I'm blogging from the YVR airport. For free. This place rocks!

(Pictures and other conference thoughts to come when I can figure out how to get my stupid cameraphone to send photos to Flickr at a higher quality.)

My portfolio/professional Web site is now up. It lives at the oh-so-unique address adriennemassanari.com.

Yes, this project may have been another attempt to procrastinate on the diss. At least it's important procrastination (as if there is such a thing!).

Apparently, it is a surprise to no one (except me) that I passed my general exams yesterday. It's weird to be PhC/ABD (acronyms that mean nothing outside of the university). Thanks to all (friends, family, A) who made this possible.

:)

My general exams start today. 4 days of thinking very hard and writing a bunch. Wish me luck!

I'm teaching an upper-division new media class at the UW for the next two quarters, called "Navigating Information Networks." The class Web site is already posted, and my students will be collectively blogging throughout the quarter. It should prove entertaining.

In other news, despite blog being crowned the word of the year by Merriam-Webster dictionary, only 38% of Americans online are familiar with them. Even fewer people, 7% according to a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project report, have actually created a blog. And, who knows how many of those individuals actually update their blogs, um, regularly.

So, if so few people are using them, are blogs really changing the face of politics, culture, society, [enter any metaconcept here]...? Or is the phenomenon just a bunch of hype?

Wouldn't you love it if all of your problems could be solved using only two easy-to-remember phrases? The Two Things presents short, informative gems that just might help solve your work and/or life problems. Here are a few to whet your appetite (via xBlog):

The Two Things about Art Criticism:
1. If it isn't novel, critics aren't interested.
2. If it is novel, no one else is interested.
-TheLetterM

The Two Things about World Conquest:
1. Divide and Conquer.
2. Never invade Russia in the winter.
-Tim Lee

The Two Things about Working with Building Materials:
1. It's all about the wood.
2. Don't giggle like a 12-year-old when the L is not pronounced in caulk.
-Dina

The Two Things about Dormitory Food:
1. Everything is cold, except what should be.
2. Everything is greasy, including the corn flakes.
-Steverino

The Two Things about Blogging:
1. Everyone who runs one is a kook.
2. Everyone who comments in one is a kook.
-Josh

Other educational links:

• Maybe you're doing a report for your LIS class, or maybe you're just inquisitive.... Regardless, you might be wondering when the first metallographic printing happened in Holland. Find out on this most excellent timeline of the history of information.

• I'm always curious why it takes about the same amount of time to fly from Seattle to Amsterdam as it does to fly from Seattle to Tokyo. And it's weird that one of these flights goes near the North Pole rather than going across the US, then across the Atlantic (but, I guess it makes sense, given the whole "round earth" thing...). Anyway, if you're so inclined, you can map your next airplane trip using the Great Circle Mapper - and, you can also be a big nerd like me!

• Ingenious is a fantastic site; it houses a huge collection of images from the UK's Science Museum, National Railway Museum, and National Museum of Photography. There site also includes a number of short articles on history and technology.

• More educational links can be found at Museum Stuff, a collection of pretty much everything related to museums - online exhibits, guides, jobs, etc. I had no idea that there was an entire museum devoted to carrots. My life is now complete.

• Ever wondered what the front page looks like on your favorite (offline) newspaper? Wonder no longer - the Newseum has a collection of today's front pages from a number of worldwide papers. It's updated daily.

And in the non-educational, "Did I post this already?" category: Brad Sucks offers a compilation of music inspired by the subject lines from spam.

One of my professors is working with public libraries across the country to create a day of panels, roundtables, art events, etc. that will promote civic engagement and deliberation around local community issues. These events are scheduled to happen on September 11, 2004, and David has asked for everyone's help in getting the word out. Here's his description of The September Project:

On December 18, 2001, by a vote of 407-0, Congress designated September 11th as Patriot Day. We believe the most patriotic gesture citizens can make on this day is to come together in public places like local libraries. Through talks, roundtables, deliberations, and performances, citizens will participate collectively and think creatively about our country, our government, our community, and encourage and support the well-informed voice of the American citizenry.

Public libraries provide all citizens open and free access to information. Almost all communities in the US have at least one library. There are over 16,000 public libraries in the US, and that's not including university libraries, K-12 libraries, and church libraries. In other words, libraries constitute an already existing national infrastructure. Moreover, 96% of all public libraries in the US are wired, partly due to the Gates Foundation's successful library initiative. Therefore, libraries also constitute a national and distributed media infrastructure.

The September Project has three goals:

1. to coordinate with all libraries -- public, university, research; local, national, global -- to foster multiple public spaces for citizens to come together and participate in events on September 11, 2004;

2. to work with all modes of media -- popular and alternative; streaming/digital media, radio, television, print -- in order to transform local conversations into national and international interactions;

3. to continue doing this annually and internationally on September 11th. The aim of The September Project is to create a day of engagement, a day of community, a day of democracy. Our goal is to foster a tradition for citizens around the world to recognize and give meaning to September 11th.

We invite you to visit our web site http://www.theseptemberproject.org and to get involved. Although our initial organizational strategies have been focused primarily on the US, our aim is international. Thank you for your time,

david silver
http://www.theseptemberproject.org

As Studs Terkel notes in a recent interview with Clamor Magazine, creating hope is all about the creation of dialogue: "...it’s a question of people just gathering and most of all thinking for themselves. People could call a meeting, about anything, peace, the environment, civil liberties, but it could be about stoplights, kid crossing the streets. It could be any issue that becomes a community issue."

Ashcroft suggested during his testimony before the 9-11 Commission that the Clinton administration should be held accountable for the September 11th attacks. From a rhetorical standpoint, Ashcroft's complete statement is fascinating. He notes,

But the simple fact of Sept. 11 is this: we did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies. Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions and starved for basic information technology. The old national intelligence system in place on Sept. 11 was destined to fail.

Ashcroft suggests throughout his comments that outdated technology and outmoded ways of dealing with terrorist threats were also to blame for the entire tragedy.

After I became attorney general in February 2001, it soon became clear that the FBI's computer technology and information management was in terrible shape. The bureau essentially had 42 separate information systems, none of which were connected. Agents lacked even the most basic Internet technology.

These problems did not just hamper interagency communication; they hindered information sharing with the Justice Department, the intelligence community and state and local law enforcement. It is no wonder, given the state of its technology, that the Phoenix memo warning that terrorists may be training in commercial aviation was lost in the antique computers at Washington headquarters.

Yet for year after year, the FBI was denied the funds requested for its information technology. Over eight years, the bureau was denied nearly $800 million of its information technology funding requests. To put this $800 million shortfall in perspective, the trilogy program, which is now revolutionizing computer, data and information sharing at the bureau, has cost $580 million.

Throughout his statement, Ashcroft invokes the words "truth" (as applied to the Commission's fact finding mission), and "evil" (as applied to the terrorists, and specifically, Osama bin Laden) - and not surprisingly, various other tropes are invoked by both Ashcroft and the Commission. I hope the rhetoricians out there are taking notes.

More information (along with PDFs of witness testimony) can be found on the Commission's Web site.

There's a thought-provoking article in today's New York Times Magazine emphasizing the importance of class-based diversity on college campuses.

We are often reminded of how white our classrooms would look if we did away with affirmative action. But imagine what Harvard would look like if instead we replaced race-based affirmative action with a strong dose of class-based affirmative action. Ninety percent of the undergraduates come from families earning more than $42,000 a year (the median household income in the U.S.) -- and some 77 percent come from families with incomes of more than $80,000, although only about 20 percent of American households have incomes that high. If the income distribution at Harvard were made to look like the income distribution of the United States, some 57 percent of the displaced students would be rich, and most of them would be white. It's no wonder that many rich white kids and their parents seem to like diversity. Race-based affirmative action, from this standpoint, is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality. The fact (and it is a fact) that it doesn't help to be white to get into Harvard replaces the much more fundamental fact that it does help to be rich and that it's virtually essential not to be poor.

(From: Diversity's False Solace)

I love Frontline on PBS, but I often miss it. Fortunately, I've just discovered that a bunch of episodes are available online, including some of my personal favorites - Merchants of Cool and Dot Con.

In other news, I'm reading Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness, which is finally out in paperback. It's a great piece of journalism, and it makes me want to write stuff like it...or just write, period.

Oh, speaking of journalism, there was also an interesting interview in this week's The Stranger with Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass. I still haven't seen Shattered Glass, but it's on my list.

And here's a random link that's too good not to share - a bunch of Flash art pieces (I especially like the black ribbon one) by Yugo Nakamura.