Enter World: exploring mediated cultures

Monday, August 31, 2009

Do we really want to be psychologically analyzed by our tweets?

Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count text analysis and the Regressive Imagery Dictionary Dan Zarrella designed TweetPsych to do just that. His blog post introducing the concept, and the beta site itself, explain that users who participate in Twitter conversationally rather than using it for content distribution will receive more insightful results. Despite my account being somewhat information oriented and in the 500-tweet range (1,000 or more tweets also return better results), I ran the posts through to see what I’d get.

The summary showed my highest score in Cognitive Content / Time followed by Primordial, Conceptual and Emotional Content / Temporal References and Abstract thought. My tweets also highlight the past tense and cognitive processes like learning, thinking, knowing, etc.

Furthering the applicability of TweetPsych, Zarrella’s post today introduces characteristic rankings showing a list of the top 20 users in categories including anxiety, oral fixation, and social processes.

Despite the disclaimer that it’s for entertainment purposes only, there is something about this concept that feels off to me. I can’t tell yet if it has more to do with sectioning off aspects of identity when using different social media tools (as in revealing a different component of yourself to Twitter than, say, to MySapce, and different still from Flickr) ... or if it’s because the analysis was approached from a social media marketing standpoint.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

An article I wrote on the Obscurae Gallery project is up at JPGmag. Below is the introduction, but head on over there to see more photos and read it all.

Braddock, Pennsylvania, has a haunting beauty that draws in photographers. From those who live in nearby Pittsburgh to travelers from around the world, something about this town grabs their attention and reveals itself in their visions.

Within these photographs there is a bridge between how the small town appears to daily commuters and what lies beneath. Beneath the abandoned buildings we find brilliant colors seeping into rough, rusted metal. Green vines, weeds, and moss overtake broken remnants of what was left behind.

This divide between the view of Braddock from a distance and the beautiful details captured by photographers sparked inspiration for me and two friends: We decided to bring the enthusiasm full circle by displaying the photographs of 28 artists featuring obscure, intriguing details of Braddock in a fundraising photo lottery to support community and artistic projects in the town that has inspired so much creative vision.

Read more...

Friday, July 10, 2009

A back-and-forth legal case surrounding social networking access between Power.com and Faebook covered in Mashable (Power.com Sues Facebook: Data Ownership War Breaks Out) introduced me to Power.com as a new option for accessing social networks.

It’s curious that the Power.com logo still has a Facebook petal (or fan blade?) even though it is notably missing from the login options.

Could be a sign that they are hopeful to regain access, useful to their case, or just an oversight.

All that aside, it seems like Power.com is yet another improvement in applications to network the networks. From one page you can read messages, updates, profiles, and look at albums plus access all of your contacts from across social networks.

They’ve also added chat and a radio. I’m a huge fan of online radio. When I’m working is about the only time I sit and listen for an extended time and being exposed to Pandora‘s selection has introduced me to some great musicians over the years. I also love being able to listen to KXLL in Juneau for all their great shows. It’s an alluring concept to integrate an international radio show with a social network hub. It could lead to longer time spent logged into the network hub on top of providing background music while catching up on social news.

The main limitation I see in Power.com right now is the concentration on specific big name sites. You can only integrate Twitter, LinkedIn, Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, Flogão and VoteMe. Of these options I have two accounts and regularly use one, so there isn’t much incentive to consolidate at this point. While it’s understandable that integrating each network requires coding (that can apparently cause lawsuits), my ideal social aggregator would function more like NetNewsWire does for information feeds.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

I’m a huge fan of CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) and have rallied a group in Braddock to join the Dillner Family Farms two years in a row. That same ethic of grassroots support is popping up in the information field with a prime example being Firedoglake’s call to fund investigative blogger Marcy Wheeler.

The phenomenal initial success collecting individual donations, with a goal of reaching $150,000 to fund three full time positions, is being spread through Tweets. The amount raised went up over $200 in the few minutes since I started writing this post.

Last year I wrote about Spot.us starting a community funded reporting site that is now active. The difference between a site devoted to funding journalism and an online news site asking for funding for an existing investigative reporter is that the people donating to Spot.us will be motivated by funding reporting and may want to spread around the funds they can donate, while the Firedoglake readers are already familiar with the reporter and have been benefiting from free reporting up to this call for help.

Compare over $19,000 in one day of donations at Firedoglake to most articles having a few hundred raised on Spot.us. There is also a huge difference in the amount being asked for—on Spot.us the total needed seems to range from a couple hundred to a couple thousand and is not meant to support three full-time positions. The goals are different, the environments are different—but the reader support is a binding thread and something that holds promise for the future of media.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

I’ve briefly touched on how cell phones can be used by news services to reach communities that don’t have access to computers and the Internet, but lately I’m becoming more and more convinced that we are migrating away from computers in general. And I haven’t even played with an iPhone yet—actually, I would suggest that the iPhone is in an entirely different category because of its computer-style interface and connection to the Internet. What I’ve been looking into is text message access.

Social Networks

Online social networks are offering ways to connect with contacts outside of their websites. Google’s Gmail and Yahoo! Messenger both have features allowing chat messages to be sent to cell phones. There are also a number of free Facebook applications allowing users within Facebook to send messages out to cell phones. There is also an application aptly named Chat To Text that offers a paid service connecting a range of social networks with cell phone text messaging.

The technology isn’t new, there have been free web services sending text messages to cell phones for years. What is different is the ability to connect a larger group that may not have otherwise shared personal contact information such as a phone number, allowing social networking connections to move beyond the computer.

Information Access

Another area that is expanding through text messaging is access to information. Google is a prime example here. By sending a text to 466453 (Google) you can ask for information found in their features including directions, definitions, and even conversions offered in the calculator. I’ve been taken to the wrong location by my GPS (I just love when it tells me to turn into someone’s driveway as if it’s a street) and turned to text message directions to get back on the road, headed in the right direction.

Photo Sharing

Along with text messaging and calling, cell phones have all sorts of bells and whistles. Photos are one, with many phones now able to take decent digital photos. Unfortunately some phones don’t offer easy access to the stored files. Services like Pikchur.com come in here, offering a personalized email address to send photos to through MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) as opposed to SMS (Short Message Service). Not only does this enable moving the photos off of the phone, but these sites also form networks of people sharing content and provide the option to simultaneously post to multiple networks.

Overall, we’re moving away from the need for a computer and Internet access to connect to networks that were originally formed online. Other countries may be far ahead of the States in cell phone features, but we’re getting there.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Typically I see advertising as an invasion. It might be that the volume goes up, the aesthetics are not pleasing to me, and often the messages themselves flop in their attempts to be rad.

In one of the archived presentations by Dana Boyd that I watched, she said the MySpace users she interacts with had a completely different reaction to advertising: It was a sign of stability. They were more confident that sponsored sites/tools/tech would stick around while the free and ad-free offerings were somewhat shunned for fear that they would disappear.

JPG Magazine all but disappeared. It has a bit of a torrid past, drama among the owners and a flood of user loss in response. But overall the concept of an online community contributing and rough editing the content of a print publication is a great one. Which is why, despite the drama and changes already past, I was happy to hear the magazine would be bought out instead of folding. The active community was credited with saving the magazine due to all of the hype generated after the closure was announced.

And today when I went to the site and saw an ad about how to lose 2 pounds of your stomach fat ... that first twinge of disgust reminded me of the potential for stability ... 

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Everywhere I look in my feeds and alerts there are short pieces about the increase in lawsuits against bloggers popping up. But what does 4 lawsuits in 1997 versus 89 in 2007 really mean?

The madness seems to arise from division: 89 is 22.25 times 4. That sounds pretty impressive.

But what if we use something a little more meaningful like the percentage of the blogs involved in lawsuits to compare this much-cited statistic?

Blogging began in the 1990s. As far back as 1993 there was a forest protection blog, in 1994 there was a student writing a diary online, but it wasn’t until 1999 that blogs took off. And it wasn’t until 2001 that they became mainstream. Then in 2004 they flew into the spotlight. The number of people blogging increased with the popularity of blogging. The question becomes: How many bloggers were there in 1997?

We’ll start in 2007 and work backward. In 2007, there were over 70 million blogs. It is important to note that this is only how many blogs Technorati was tracking at that time, the actual number of blogs was most likely higher.  With 89 lawsuits spread out between 70,000,000 blogs that would be .0001% of blogs in 2007 that were called into courts. 

The State of Technorati only goes back as far as 2004 when the 3 millionth blog was tracked and 12,000 new blogs were being created every day.

It’s more difficult to find the number of blogs from 1997. A BloggerCon post estimates no more than 4 to 5 blogs were up in 1997. That would mean 100% of blogs in 1997 were called into court!?

The BBC says in 1998 there were 23 blogs. Just for fun, let’s use this number—because it’s hard to believe that ALL the blogs in 1997 were sued. If there were 23 blogs with 4 having lawsuits brought against them, that would mean that 17% of blogs were involved.

Let’s recap:
1997/1998: 17 or 100 percent of blogs are involved in a lawsuit
2007: .0001 percent of blogs are involved in a lawsuit

Does this sound like an increase warranting all of the hype? It is still a good thing to know the laws, and taking the free online media law class won’t hurt—but I’m beginning to think these “posts” I’ve seen are actually press releases pushing the sale of buying insurance.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

As a communications design professional, I first discovered open access in the form of software. But in practice, I have been involved with open-access information and publishing since I was in high school cutting and pasting together zines. We went so far as to “merge” with a group from another high school that also had a zine so that we could increase our reach when we handed out the free rags.

Later I applied this concept as a hobby in Juneau, but increased the open aspect by soliciting all of the content from the community. By then technology had advanced enough that I wasn’t cutting, pasting and photocopying the zines ... but I still tried to keep a little of that rough aesthetic as homage to one of the first forms of self-made media.

As mainstream media embraces the DIY media tools spawned after zines, but instead uses the content to target (or create) advertising, I can’t help but wonder if this will unintentionally expand the groups that create media and push open-access creation of new tools.

Media participation supported by others, such as using open-access software for blogs or even building an ad with pieces provided by a corporation, could be a way of entry leading to further exploration with media creation. Zines began with letters to magazine editors. Once science fiction magazines began printing these letters with contact information for the writers, communities began to spring up between these fans. In a similar manner, participation through the foundations of existing media outlets can allow for networking and growth. However, it is in the later stages of participation that individuals are able to combine the developed domain-relevant skills with creativity-relevant skills to begin producing their own media products. How many will go the way of open access?

The way I see it there are many many aspects of open access. It’s not just about Wikipedia or sharing publicly funded research—it’s about both public and expert information. Some fear that replacing expert knowledge with mass-conceived data in places like Wikipedia will be the end of culture. Others see the same tool as democratic and offering a way to expand knowledge.

Offering scientific, medical, and technology research in an open-access format allows the public to see what the experts are doing. It also encourages involvement with these fields in a way that has not been open to the public previously. Being exposed to research, or at least having it available to anyone interested, encourages understanding of important issues at the local and global level. In turn, access to tools where non-expert information can be shared furthers these discussions.

Open-access media is the final step in the circle. It provides a way to communicate the information through distribution, discussion, and integration with other information.

In celebration of the first Open Access Day I’ve compiled a list of open-access psychology and media sources. Read them, interact with them, make your own:

• Directory of Open Access Journals: Psychology
  
  • Brains, Minds & Media
  • Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace
• Directory of Open Access Journals: Media & Communications
  
  • FibreCulture
  • Invisible Culture
  • Journal of Science Communication
  • Journal of Virtual Worlds Research
• Open Yale Courses: Introduction to Psychology

Saturday, September 20, 2008

I just completed the Media Bloggers Association course on Online Media Law offered by NewsU.

It was a great refresher course on defamation, invasion of privacy, and copyright infringement. The use of recent court cases gave it a timeliness and tie to current events that is missing if you try to simply read about these topics in books or on sites. Of course this is also a brief online class, estimated to take one to two hours, and as such is an overview.

One issue of interest to me is that the course states the Communications Decency Act, Section 230, protects bloggers from being held responsible for comments made on their sites even if they are edited for length or decency so long as the original meaning is not changed. This legislation is from 1996, and what confuses me is that earlier this month the Poynter Institute’s Feedback Guidelines had information about courts deciding that site publishers were responsible for feedback if it was approved rather than automatically submitted. Poynter and NewsU are affiliated and that information is no longer on the guidelines page. However the Wikipedia entry on Section 230 does not list any new relevant cases.

This is interesting to me, because a couple weeks ago I disabled comments after reading the information at Poynter. With over 50 spam comments coming in per day, there was no option other than manually filtering comments. This may change things ...

Monday, July 28, 2008

Stoooopid .... why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks is another look at how media technology and social networking can sliver our thoughts. What most writers fail to note when lamenting the use of the Internet is that choices are involved. Brushing off Google, Microsoft, IMB, and Intel as “the companies most active in denying us our craving for depth, the great distracters” is an easy way to blame others for what one chooses to do with the access.

While skimming many things on the Internet is an option, it is also possible to become immersed in a good book or long article using the same medium. Check out the Top 100 Books being downloaded at Project Gutenberg, or read the close to 2,000-word article I’m discussing here.

In addition, it’s necessary to distinguish between multitasking and interruption. I would argue they are not the same thing. Advertisements, train announcements, the neighbor’s blaring radio ... these are not a part of multitasking. Our attention is not being intentionally split between this and another project, it is being distracted by uninvited or unexpected information. Multitasking could mean copying the information being researched into an email for a friend, while creating a post about it and keeping the database searches running for more information. There is a huge difference in the level of concentration being given to the deep thoughts about a project when it is being interpreted for various outlets versus pulling out of those deep thoughts to address something else.