being in the world-wide-web

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:14:00 +0000

Honour Thy Father! This made me laugh...

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:47:00 +0000

David Hockney and the iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:44:00 +0000

A few days ago the BBC ran a great article on the art work of David Hockney. This included three digital paintings that he did on his iPhone.

I was really impressed so I thought I would have a go myself. Here is David's:

And here is mine:

I don't see the difference!

MySpace and Class

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:42:00 +0000

I was really pleased to read danah Boyd's recent piece taken from the PDF conference on 'The not-so-hidden politics of class online'. I was first pleased to see that she had taken the time to recognise how MySpace is not 'dead', rather that it just appeals to a younger audience, which is sometimes not apparent to an academic community.

The issue of class is an interesting one. And one that she is correct in writing will not simply go away by 'fixing' the technology. More and more the Internet is becoming about people. We need to find the best way of designing the site so that that there is a high level of functionality and usability, but this needs to be combined with the way that groups of people come together in the space, the sociability. Of the research I have conducted on MySpace I have certainly seen a wider range of cultural differences on MySpace compared to that of Facebook. This is related to the sense of 'homophily' as Danah suggest (also Mike Thelwall has a good paper on homophily and MySpace) and I think we need to think more about the different ways that people tend to stick in groups online. What is the experience of those who and try and cross different social boundaries? Something I have found in MySpace is that those people who try and make 'new' friends construct the practice in such a way that are instantly recognisable as part of the same group (here is your homophily) - this practice then requires the entirety of the profile. So, for example, a user may change their profile layout, write a new blog, add a new song and then begin a conversation with one (or many) of a desired group of people. The other people that they talk to and the things they do are also of a great importance. It is in then in these practices that social inequities are continually reproduced. It is in this way that homophily is constructed through the community practices that draw the boundaries between different social groups.

We need good technological usability that is open to all and 'critical eye' for the way new technology is enabling social inequality.

Lovely article, hopefully there will be more on this soon.

boyd, danah. 2009. "The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online." Personal Democracy Forum, New York, June 30.

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:01:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:14:00 +0000

Roundtable Link

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 08:04:00 +0000

HERE is the link to the Roundtable sound file (thanks once again to Thies for making the recording)

Conference pics and recording

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:00:00 +0000

I am back in Loughborough from an excellent trip to Copenhagen with all the AoIR people. The conference this year benefited from a wide range of topics and methods. I was really please with the roundtable that Daniel and I organised (Nancy counted over a 100 hundred people) and think that it worked as a good opportunity for the audience to ask questions that may have gone unanswered otherwise. Although, next year I will definitely present a paper as I don't think the folks at aoir would let me get away with just doing a roundtable again! I have posted a couple of photos to my flickr account (here) that were taken on the day (thanks to Theis).

This sound file is also from the even, which I will have to upload from work because my connection from home is to slow. I will do that tomorrow. Check back here for that...

IR 9 and other stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:04:00 +0000

I am shortly leaving for Copenhagen and this year's IR 9.0 conference which looks to be amazing. They have over 400 people due to be gracing the ITU this week. Once more let me promote the Roundtable that myself and Daniel Skog (Umea University) will be chairing entitled 'Life on the Move: Social Network sites and Online Communities'. We have some excellent speakers lined up including Nancy Baym, Malene Larson, Amanda Lenhart, Raquel Recuero and Jan Schmidt. With the massive amount of people there and the time limitations on each paper session, we hope that our Roundtable will serve as a good opportunity to actually have the time to ask a question and discuss some of the core issues of the conference a s a whole.

Conference season seems to be in full swing now after attending the ATACD conference last week and a trip I have planned to the States in the coming weeks.

I also might have time to squeeze in the odd other bits and pieces, but they mostly will have to be in England before Xmas. One thing that caught my eye was the following day at the British Library talking and about 'Web 2.0 and Social Research' on the 4Th Nov. Let me know if you are interested and I will send you more details.

MySpace webcam recording

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 10:00:00 +0000

Visual Psychologies Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:32:00 +0000

Yesterday I attended The 'Visual Psychologies' conference at the Leicester school of management. It was an erudite display of, not only, the diverse work that is being conducted in that department, but a wonderful representation of the growing argument for a purely discursive explanation of behaviour. The conference began with a talk by Paula Reavey entitled 'Back to Experience: Material subjectivites and the visual'. In this talk Dr Reavey grounded the visual in how people experience their social world through a illuminating use of empirical research. This presented data that embodied the subject as an expressive individual who is bound up with a material setting. This first talk set the scene for a strong inquiry into the visual that was only furthered by the second speaker, Carey Jewitt, who commented on 'Educational Research: A social semiotic multimodal approach'. This talk was mostly based on the visual stimuli that children come in contact with in a school setting. I particularly enjoyed the reference to the body position of the teacher in relation to the working model of the body and the blackboard. This showed how the body was reconfigured as visual plane that constructed knowledge through the layers of communication in the body.

Alan Bryman (who is head of the school of management) then had the difficult task of summarising the two talks that went before. He did an excellent job and reflected on three main points of the 1) participatory aspects of the visual 2) reflexivity of the researcher and 3) The role of the visual in the world and related this to the wider debate between conversation analysis and that which is outside the discursive. At the break this left a lingering question of what others forms of the visual should we be using. Thankfully, the answer to this question shone through in the second half of the proceeding. Firstly, Maggie O'Neils excellent display of 'Ethno-mimesis as performance praxis' showed how the complexity of lived experiences could be conveyed through art projects of particularly sensitive social groups: Of most striking was the collection of self images made by a group of prostitutes. The produced an 'alternative voice' for the subject involved and made clear how, in unlocking the visual, Maggie was able to tap into something much deeper. This was then followed by Janice Haaken short film about life behind the mental health system in Oregon named 'Insanity Defence'. This film used conversation with patients and staff to represent a number of wider issues within the system of mental health including the authoritarian role of the psychologist and certain class issues. The end of the day was wrapped up some open discussion that focused on the difference between a 'good' and 'bad' image. It was felt that an image doesn't need to be particularly artists to form good data on the embodied life-world of a participant. Steve Brown led the discussion towards a definitive version of what we mean by visual methods and showed how this has a myriad of meanings from the diverse range of the research. Needless to say the debate ran on late into the evening at the pub. I am now looking forward to travelling to the International Graduate Conference tomorrow hopefully that will be as thought-provoking as yesterday.

Conference Time

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:08:00 +0000

I am attending two excellent one-day conferences this week. This first is co-organised by my supervior (Steve Brown) and Paula Reavey entitled 'visual Psychologies'. This looks to be an excellent opportunity to discuss the increase of the the visual in a number of disciplines and how this relates to notions of subjectivity, discourse and organisation.Speakers here include Alan Bryman, Carey Jewitt, Maggie O'Neil. I will post most details of the conference tomorrow. The second is the International Graduate Conference (IGC 2008) taking place in Cambridge (for more general info see here) where I will be speaking on the challenge 'faced' by academics who use Facebook. Here is a crib of the Abstract:

... In 2005, Facebook was opened to a public network (whereas before users had to be connected through a school or college) and millions of people, young and old, snatched at the opportunity to connect with people all over the globe. This evidently brought many challenges into the 21st Century regarding SNSs including: privacy issues, data protection and searchability. There is also a collection of sub-issues that manifest with the enigmatic growth of Facebook. One potentially difficult issue is how academics can get the most out of Facebook without forcibly encountering the personal lives of their prospective students (this is based on a variety of studies finding that many students disclose personal information on these sites, see Stutzman, 2006). This recognises that there is a wealth of communication to be harnessed through Facebook, which can be incredibly useful at all levels of academia. The secret to unlocking this potential will be unpacked into three main areas: 1) the balance between Facebook as a useful tool for communicating with students and the traditional ways that Facebook is abused 2) the implications of combining institutional ‘blackboards’ with Facebook applications 3) how Facebook represents a natural progression of communication through the ages and not a unique phase in web 2.0 history that can be ignored. The challenge to the academic community is to take some simple steps that will maintain the equilibrium between students and staff who utilise Facebook.

The EEE pc giveaway

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:04:00 +0000

Following the comment stream on Engadget it is pretty clear that the initial reaction to the eeepc giveaway is not good. Read here to check out more. Basically, for a thirty-five pound contract T-mobile are offering a free eee pc and a mobile USB broadband connector. I have to say I agree with the numerous people who have posted on the engadget website - this is not a good deal. I pay fifteen pounds a month for my mobile braodband with 3, and that is more than enough (I actually only paid that much because on some occasions it is my only source of connection). But, the main beauty of the eepc is how cheap it is. My advice; if you want an eeepc, buy one.

MySpace loses to Wiki information

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:26:00 +0000

Today I read a interesting argument on the 'Hacking MySpace' blog that stated how users turned to wiki's for more information than the MySpace blog of a particular band. I think I have to agree, when I am looking for band information (and by this I assume people mean tour dates and biographical information) wiki is the best place to go. However, I also do a large amount of searching through listening, for which, MySpace is excellent. I'm wondering if actually there might be a more convoluted relationship between information and the MySpace user. Could it be that a large number of users may look at wiki after doing some 'audio' research through MySpace first?

Also, how many users base their decision on where to look for information based on the perceived authenticity of the site? By this I mean to tap into the still nostalgic members of the MySpace community, who believe groups and bands maintain their own MySpace profiles. This may compare to the commonly accepted idea that wikis can be produced by anyone. One would also assume that the MySpace profile contains more up-to-date information. In light of this why do many poeple choose a wiki for information? The article seems to suggest that the 'glitz and glamour' of some MySpace pages may be off-putting to those users who are thirsty for information. And I agree, there are many ways that a wiki may seem easier to navigate, but to what extent could it also be related to situation issue of being 'caught on MySpace'. I wonder this as I walk around my university library where Facebook and MySpace are frowned upon. Is a wiki now a way of seeming to be in line with the institution while still achieving some personal interests? It is true that it would more difficult to frown upon wikipedia in the same light as it has some obvious educational uses. The regimented style of the wiki page makes it unrecognisable as a piece that is not directed towards a certain activity.I certainly think there are many ways the switch to wiki could be conceived, and a level of information is definitely one of those.

On a final note, it was great to read the line 'we all love MySpace'. For the time being Facebook seems to be growing exponentially and it is nice to read that some people still wrestle with the issues that go on in MySpace.

'Life on the Move': Social network sites and online communities

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:16:00 +0000

I would like to join Daniel Skog(here) in advertising our roundtable discussion at this years IR 9.0 conference in Copenhagen. We have a great collection of people coming together to discuss the tribulations involved with studing 'community' now that SNSs are dominating the online social landscape. Here is an extract from the roundtable description:

Social network sites (SNSs) like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace are rapidly becoming a popular area of research investigating online 'communities'. This immediately raises the question of how new SNSs can be understood as a descendent of the 'virtual community' that was popularized in the 1980's (Rheingold, 1993). One irrefutable piece of information is that the number of users that seem to be joining these new sites has been growing substantially over the last few years (i.e. comScore reported Facebook had an increase of 270% between June 2006 and June 2007). This could indicate that SNSs has become an integral part of everyday online activity as a whole. The purpose of this roundtable is to further discussions on the present shapes of online communities in light of the current trajectory of social network popularity. In particular, to what extent are online communities tied to a particular site? And consequently, how can we rethink notions of community in line with recent trends in SNSs?
[...] The underlying premise is that 'life on the move' produces a certain problem for academic researchers as to how we locate the individual (or the community) in such a dispersed social landscape. Therefore, how can we understand community involvement when users are members of a number of different community sites and SNSs and move regularly from one site to another? A further problem here is how we as researchers resist the mundane assumption that inherently complex online communities are only recognisable in terms of the users movement in and out of them, surely there is much more to it than that.

Already?

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:54:00 +0000

MySpace Games

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:40:00 +0000

MySpace is entering a brave new world by introducing games to be played accross the network. They include traditonal games like solitare and sudoku plus the introduction of some newer looking games like line rider (a game where you draw a slope in a paint-like function that then becomes the slope for your rider). The games are accesible from a link on the front page or by following this link. The games obviously lack a fair amount of sophistication that has come to be expected of online gaming in the last decade. But, perhaps, this is their appeal. I must admit they have a somewhat quirky nature and it seems that the games are intentionally designed to be cut and pasted effortlessly. This could be seen as an attempt to rival gaming such as 'scrabulous' that has become popular on Facebook.

Real Life vs Second Life

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:40:00 +0000

Last night there was an excellent show on BBC 2 as part of the Wonderland series that covered Seond Life. Here is the youtube link (unfortunately embedding has been disabled). It followed the journey of two couples who were seemingly ready to make real life changing decision besed on their second life relationships. As you can imagine, the two couples end up at rather different outcomes by the end of the journey. The first couple ultimately get married in SL with the rest of their real life families all hooked into the SL network to see the prestigious event. The second couple how a wife and mother of two kids travels half the way round the world to find out that the person she met in SL does nothing for her in Real Life. It was really interesting to see how this SL committment actually exists in everyday interactions. The clip I have posted in particularily good as it is from the view of the husbad who's wife leave America for her SL 'boyfriend' who lives in England. There are some fantastic clips where all parties involved speak about the versions of 'the real'. And it was great to see that it was all about the people instead of this look at what the technology was doing. It was a cutting edge take and how the people make this technology what is it. There is a lovely clip where the two who meet up in England go for a picnic in the park and they are just sat silently next to each other. Obviously, the build up to leaving America involved a number of intense arguments that were now finished with this very anti-climatic walk through a London park - As if to say 'uh is this it then?' The section that followed showed her talking through how she couldn't have both worlds and actually felt kind of sorry for her. Her SL character she confessed 'was everything that she wanted to be' and that all she wanted to do is 'bring a little bit of that into the real world'. For those two that got married their real life counterparts had been everything they wanted to be, but obviously this took some adjustent from them to see that they would not have the physical characteristic they do in SL. Perhaps what is needed here is an ability to see that they only thing that is really 'true' in SL is the interaction itself.

Deleting Facebook might not be as easy as you think

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:17:00 +0000

If you are like me, you would assume that profile pages can be destroyed as easily as they are created. However, the ICO has found that Facbook pages in the UK are particularly difficult to delete and require users to remove each individual wall post. This could be potentially thousands of wall posts for many users. The interesting question is how do we alert users to the problems with deleting their profile pages? The possibility of a banner saying ' we store your information indefinitely' seems a little much. Although I agree with the direction of the argument. Please don't anybody say we need to educate people more. I'm not entirely sure this is always the answer. What we need to do is make the technology easier to use. But, Facebook is certainly under no pressure to do this.

Check out this article on the unofficial facebook blog to read more.

Friends like these

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 13:30:00 +0000

I have some immediate reactions to the article in the Guardian on Monday 14th January entitled 'With Friends like these...'(here is the link) that I was alerted to through the nettime listserv. This article really tells us more about the author (Tom Hodgkinson) than it does about Facebook, opening with line 'I despise Facebook'. The article fits with a classically naive version of the social implications of the Internet that arrives with each new technological possibility (email, you tube, blogging and now SNS like Facebook). There are always those saying, well actually, doesn't the Internet actually make us further apart? No. If anything, the net allows people to be even more social in their everyday lives, it is incredibly reductionist to presume that one simply replaces the other. Moreover, real life and the interaction we have in online communities are uniquely interwoven into this concept of 'being social'. Tom Hodkinson reports that in Facebook 'I can construct an artificial representation of myself in order to get sex'. Again, I don't think this what the majority of people use Facebook for. Although, I am intrigued by the interactional process that leads from the simplistic movement of taking a photograph to how this is constructed into an 'artificial representation'. What about this photograph is artificial? Presumably nothing. So then it is in the surrounding discourse that brings the artificial to life. I'm sure many people like to construct a certain image online, but to condemn that entire process to be about getting sex seems farfetched.

As with any area of public life the marketers have tried to find a way to tap into potential audiences, just as two people standing on the street have a large advisement in the background, as does communication in Facebook. I completely disagree with the idea that Facebook is profoundly uncreative, particularly in light of advertising. It is important to remember that Facebook members provide the content, nothing more. From my use of Facebook and studying a similar SNS that got heavily involved with Advertising (MySpace) it is interesting to note how little notice member take of advertising. If anything, it has become an expectation of anything in a modern society. Again, what is noticeable here is that you can not accuse the people of being uncreative when you have been put off by the advertising. Uncreative, you obviously have found the wrestler application! If anything I dislike the view that people in SNS are any different to those in real-life. For many, the relations they have online are just as 'real'. Taken from the article:

Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out
of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then
sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at
all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

EEEpc

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 12:02:00 +0000

Since my time at the CPPE I seem to only be known for my little pc. So here it is. Feel free to check out some more photos on my flickr account.

A good move by Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:48:00 +0000

I have long been a believer that a cluttered profile looks messy and untidy. Maybe this says something interesting about me as a person, or maybe, there is some deeper in the sense that I like the way we can manipulate our online identity with the applications on a SNS not just through the content that we upload. That was why I was pleased to see facebook's extended utility. For a further review check out what Nick o'Neil has to say here

Inaugural lectures

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:46:00 +0000

On Wednesday, I attended two fantastic inaugural lectures at the school of management, University of Leicester. I particularly enjoyed the latter of the two that focused on media convergence in terms of the organisation (BBC, Sky etc). One thing that was brought to my attention was the role of the journalist to cover a range of media platforms. This is an interesting juxtaposition to the inherently social understanding I have come in contact with of convergence in the past. Konstantinos Saltzis put forward the idea of a 'one man band' journalist that writes once and publishes everywhere. It opposes the popular notion that convergence makes life easier by pulling everything together in one place. For journalists, the range of media platforms that their news has to reach causes more work. Interestingly, Konstantinos noticed how the journalisits consider their increased level of work is because of a rise in competition and not the nature of convergence itself. Thereby, it is because of the bloggers that the news has to now compete more often. I was surprised to hear that the journalists had located the problem in the people and not in the technology.

Seemingly unintentionally the first lecture from Sverre Spoelstra gave a philosophical insight into the differences between work and labour. As I am currently trying to work my way through a thousand plateaus this was really useful. Sverre explained how Labour is never used a noun. It never refers to an end product. Therefore, labour is unproductive. Labour is an endless cycle. Work is productive makes objects that have a life of their own. In the world we have a relationship with these products and We are consuming the products more and more in today's society – computers, mobiles etc. Sverre used a range of eminent philosophers from Locke to Foucault to present his argument.

Link to podcast from Poke 1.0

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 14:24:00 +0000

Click here to get your own player.

The social role of 'In Memoriam' notices

noreply@blogger.com (Lewis Goodings) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 00:06:00 +0000

Today I attended a talk by Stephanie O'Donohoe (Edinburgh) at the MCCi study group entitled:

Consuming, communing and coming to terms with loss:
the social role of In Memoriam notices

This is obviously very different to the information and communication stuff that I usually report on, but I have a background in Psychology and a deep interest in Philosophy as a whole. Stephanie had gathered some really great interviews with people who report anniversaries of family deaths in an Irish newspaper. This work really showed how the memory of the individuals involved were kept alive by revisiting their past in a particular form and manner. The notices paralleled a kind of singles ads column, in the sense that, the author had a limited number of words in which to express a wide array of sentiment. In Stephanie's findings, this typically meant that people used powerful phrases from the bible to express the loss of a loved one. Until later in the talk, there were many references that I was used to hearing in CMC (e.g. public/private, Anderson's Imagined Community and even the fact that In Memoriam notices had been simplified to 'IM'). This made me raise the similarities of another SNS that I commented on in the form of Mydeath space. A neat comparison here is that Stephanie has a very tight-knit community of people who were writing notices for loved ones that many of the newspaper recipients would have known. Mydeath space, however, is a much more global enterprise. I think this is a neat example of how our technological ability to do things like memory is evolving. More and more our everyday lives our becoming intrinsically in twinned with the connections growing SNSs have to offer. I wonder how the small community that typically reports deaths in a certain way would react to someone posting a death to somewhere like Myspace?

I understand memory in constant flux. For me (and many others) memory is not something that is stored in the brain. Instead, it is mediated through our close social environment by way of objects, people and experiences and this allows us to draw upon a vast myriad of experiences to invoke action in a particular setting. In this way technology allows us to constantly store up the past in emails and SNS and as technology develops so does our ability to commemorate past experiences. I am keen to think about old notions of a person or being and how that relates to the current technological environment.