More about Facebook

Since I am speaking at two different conferences about the way people participate in Facebook, I have been (believe it or not) reading about Facebook, about relationships online, about what motivates participation, and so on.

here are a few things I've noticed:

1. Though it was noted at least 5 months ago that many faculty are now using social networks and that 25-34 year-olds is the fastest growing segment of users, no one seems to be looking at how or why they use FB. Some articles have been written about faculty disclosing too much online, but so far I have found nothing else.
2. Almost every academic study (and there are many) concentrates on either how kids/teens use FB, class, racial or ethnic differences in who uses FB, how to use FB to teach, or how to use it to make money.
3. There are lots of non-academic slideshows and articles comparing FB and MySpace about how to make money or seduce women with FB. --I mention this because my search efforts are hampered by these kinds of documents cluttering the web.

But I have found some very interesting stuff about online relationships from Jonathan Marshall who has published about a concept he calls 'asence' including this one in Fibreculture. In brief, he argues that particpants in online communities experience asence, which he explains:

In offline societies, it is generally possible to tell whether a person is present or not. Presence and status are acknowledged by others making, at the least, eye contact or grunts in a person’s direction, or by their pointedly ignoring that person. Identity is reinforced by reaction. People are generally aware of who is listening to the conversation and of their reactions to each other. Online this is usually not the case. It is possible for a person to be present without others being aware of them: there is no marker of existence beyond the act of communication itself. “Asence” is the term I have coined to express this almost ontological uncertainty, or suspension of being between presence and absence.

Marshall goes on to argue that in an effort to overcome asence, participants will exaggerate gender characteristics and may also use romance and even netsex to reinforce intimacy. He developed these ideas from studying the Cybermind mailing list, but I think asence could explain certain behaviors I've noticed on Facebook. --more details on that soon.

Two other useful possibilities involved Fluxus and the theory that humans have evolved to be 'infovores' --love that term! But I'll save those for the next entries...

And by the way, apparently Twitter addicts are 61.3% more likely to visit Barcamp.org than the average internet user. --Not directly related to anything, but it caught my eye. ;-)

My friends still rock

So seems like everyone is doing really cool stuff lately.

Lokman's research was actually mentioned in the Huffington Post, and even better (much better) it's now official that he will a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard next year while he finishes his dissertation. And I knew him when he was a lowly student of computer science at the University of Utrecht. :-) Back then he was not so professional and only had a personal blog (though even that looks rather pro these days) and the Wong Kar Wai site. Sigh--they grow up so fast. Ok, I was a lowly student then too, but still...

Next, Mirko, while finishing his dissertation, teaching, writing an article for a book he's helping to organize, has also put together a kickass presentation for this event at Utrecht U. where he teaches and is doing his PhD in the New Media and Digital Culture program. I am gnashing my teeth with admiration and envy. Anyway, I think he'll post the presentation somewhere soon or it will be archived and then I'll add the link here.

I, on the other hand, am just waiting to find out whether the rejection email, or the "dear author" email I received is the accurate reflection of reality. More on that later. Or not. ;-)

nothing like reading back over your dissertation...

To inspire at best that oh-so-pleasant feeling of wanting to sink through the floor. Since I decided to reformat my dissertation and put it online for free, I found it really was not possible to do that without actually reading any of it again. And boy was that fun. Yeah.

I think some of the individual chapters might be ok by themselves, but the literacy narrative in the intro. bleah. And the whole thing seems incoherent. But I suppose there's something salutary about reading back over it, just like getting plenty of fiber or something.

--let me interrupt for a minute to say that I found what seems like a cool app. on Facebook called Touchgraph Photos, and I cannot get the damned thing working. (And yes, I have checked the forum and so on.) So tiresome.

Anyway, I probably won't do much with the diss right now because I have too many other things to worry about and work on. (which should be obvious from my procrastinating with Facebook apps) But once I do, dear readers, I will of course link it from here. Maybe. If I can stand the embarrassment. :P

A funny thing I found today...

My dissertation is available online at ProQuest, linked from a slick page in the UMass Amherst (Where I did my graduate work) library. At first I thought this was kind of cool, until I found that a) they are charging people $41 for an unbound paper copy, and b) they are using a really low quality scan of the bound version in the library! Now this pisses me off on so many levels. First, here I am constantly scrounging for travel money, and someone may be profiting from my diss. without my even knowing. Second, if they had actually asked me, I could have provided a nice digital copy. Third, and most importantly, I am really annoyed not to have been asked or notified, since I am the copyright holder.

So I am going to put the whole damned thing up on Scribd for free, though frankly I find it embarrassing to put something out I wrote so long ago and wasn't so thrilled with even at the time. I think I will also send a sharp letter to the UMass Library which seems to be responsible for all this.

More good news

So now both of the panels I proposed to IR 9.0 have been accepted, which means that one of my book projects can really go forward--a collection of these papers and a few more I will invite from some other people I know who work on this stuff and who might be interested. Fingers crossed that I can get everything done when it need to be done!

MLA is a go

So I will be speaking at MLA. I'm not even sure what to think of that; I'm so used to thinking of the MLA convention as just a necessary evil for job-seekers and search committees, it seems weird to think of it as an actual academic meeting. But I'm really looking forward to it, --it's not till late next December, so it's silly to even think too much about it now since I have two other conferences and three papers to prepare between now and then. Here's the abstract and as usual, thanks to the usual suspects for feedback and editing help.

And what I really have to figure out are my travel plans for the summer; flights are horribly expensive. The dollar's turning almost into play-money doesn't help either, but if it's still in the tank by late June I'll just have to sponge of my friends in the Netherlands. --If any of you are reading, start saving up now to feed the starving American. ;-)

Where the hell are my slides?

Where the hell are my slides?
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Here I am, about to lead off my panel with a presentation entitled "let's Pretend," which covers the first stage of my research on Facebook. I argue that the risk of transgression that is built into Facebook, and in particular into certain applications and into the way users appropriate those applications in order to communicate in ways other than intended, foster a playful atmosphere and make the site more attractive.

I look so serious because I have had my laptop for only a couple of days and I can't remember where the hell I put the presentation slides. :P Lucky you; they can now be found here. [Thanks to Scribd, which is the easiest site I've seen for sharing files of all kinds--not like GoogleDocs for editing, just for sharing, plus with some social network and archiving kind of stuff built in. It seems cool.]

It was a good panel though and felt more coherent than many of the other internet/web/new media panels. And we had discussion that ran over the break and into the next panel which was rude of us, but also signals a good panel. ;-)

Internet or Digital Culture?

After attending a number of panels and the "birds-of-a-feather" meeting for people interested in Internet and Digital Culture, I was puzzled to see what difference there was between either category, apart from merely organizational. For this year's PCA/ACA conference, the call for the Digital Culture Area was focused on the "mainstreams/undercurrents", and so on, while the Internet Culture Area was open to anything. And both areas were plagued by incoherence in panels, though the Digital Culture Area seemed to have better luck on this. During the B0F meeting we talked about how more coherence might be achieved, but people seemed reluctant to ask authors to choose keywords, but some were willing to support panel calls. Privately I heard many people (not just in this area) agree that the real trouble was that paper quality is often so spotty at the PCA/ACA. I'm afraid I have to agree; it's a fun conference, but it does feel like almost anyone can get in.

I say this in part because I've heard so many presenters reveal it's their first conference ever, and the presentations lean heavily toward "hey, I found this, isn't it cool?" Theory is rarely mentioned, nor is most work contextualized in terms of other scholarship. I noticed this especially when I went to a panel in the Composition/Rhetoric Area that was all about New Media in the classroom. (Or so the panel title claimed). What I found was a number of papers rehashing concern about computers in the writing classroom, but without taking up specifics or referencing recent work about blogs or wikis, or about the easy ways to bring media in--cell-phone cameras, for example, or using del.icio.us to help students learn about researching online.

So seeing all this led me to submit an abstract to next year's MLA convention for a roundtable organized by Henry Turner called "What in the World is New Media." I feel scholarship on this continues to be ridiculously fragmented and this is caused in part by the continued segregation of New Media studies to specialized departments and curricula. So I'll post my abstract in a few days.

Fun at the PCA

Well, a quick update on the conference and I'll write more later. Before attending anything I met up with David Silver who runs the RCCS and we share coffee and what turned out to be my nearest thing to lunch.

David's even nicer (and much taller :-) )in person than online and it was a very pleasant chat out in the sun, in a little park near the Moscone Center. We talked a little about our projects and about the state of research on new media/ICT/Internet and Digital culture--how ever you want to call it. We agreed that work in the US is more fragmented than in Europe, and the lack of much public funding has given it a very different tone. More on that later.

Then I went to the conference where of course I trawled through the book exhibit, went to few panels than planned, drank too much coffee, and met some interesting people. As I said, details to come, but now once more into the breach!

Research news, conferences, etc.

So let's see; I just got accepted to IFIP WG 9.5 International Working Conference on Virtuality and Society: Massive Virtual Communities, which is the 1st and 2nd of July, 2008 at Leuphana University Lueneburg, Germany. I'm glad of that; I hear the group and the people involved are well regarded and there is a book planned, so that may guarantee me another chapter by the time my tenure review rolls around. I guess the nearest big city is Hamburg--I've never been anywhere in Germany yet, so actually anywhere will be interesting! I think it's within reach, by train, of Rotterdam, so I can fit it into my other research pretty easily.

This summer I plan to interview Florian, Mirko, Brenno; some museum folk, and see if I can volunteer at Worm, make a site visit to U. Utrecht, U. Twente, and follow up on the email interviews I'm conducting already. --Of course I talk about new media and tech stuff with Florian, Mirko and Brenno anyway, but I need to do formal interviews to make sure that I get some comparable answers among all of them. Oh yeah, I also want to talk to the women at Gender Changers.

And, if my panel proposals get since at least one panel proposal has been accepted to IR 9.0, I need to work on that some. And there's the SFRA Europe plan.....oy veh. Overbooked again.