Things I’ve come across recently and don’t want to forget

Marres, N  2009  Testing powers of engagement: Green living experiments, the ontological turn and the undoability of involvement. European Journal of Social Theory 12(1): 117-133

How public experiments (like the green energy meters) are conducted in private home spaces and then republicised, for instance on a blog – a way to engage people (with their environments as well as engage an audience for the public experiment).

 

 

Cenite, M; Detenber, BH; Koh, AWK; Lim, ALH  2009  Doing the right thing online: a survey of bloggers’ ethical beliefs and practices.  New Media & Society 11(4):575-597

Study revealed four underlying ethical principles of blogging: truth telling, accountability, minimising harm and attribution.

 

 

boyd, danah  2006 A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium. Reconstruction 6(4)

Blog blurring textuality and orality, private and public.

Slow blogging…it must be article time

There has been scant blogging around here lately.  I’ve been working on a paper for a conference on environmental, cultural, social and economic sustainability.  I was accepted as a virtual participant, which basically means I write an article and it gets peer reviewed for publication in the journal associated with the conference.  So that’s where my paper is now – the shadowy world of peer review.   I think the organisers have struck gold with virtual participation, especially for a conference on sustainability.  The end result is broader participation with fewer air miles expended and more people reading their journal.  More conferences should have this as an option.

Anyway, here’s the abstract:

In this research I focus on bloggers’ participation in the environmental sustainability movement. The objectives are to explore the ways bloggers connect their local environmentalism with the global sustainability movement.

The investigation revolves around the role of texts and metaphors in blogging, and what these reveal about bloggers’ conceptions of the relationship between nature and technology, as well as the position of the self in the world. This ethnographic examination of the collaborative and socially constructed setting of sustainability blogging uncovers a hopeful picture of the global sustainability movement, while also highlighting its deep relationship to online virtual culture.

Virtual worlds in decline?

Oh my.  My blog is written by a man.  That’s news to me, but GenderAnalyzer surely knows best:  “We guess http://pickingupsticks.wordpress.com is written by a man (55%), however it’s quite gender neutral.” They got Strange Doctrines even more wrong–despite the title of the blog post.  Judging by the results of their accuracy polling (currently 54% accurate), GenderAnalyzer isn’t very good at what it does.

And according to the new Digital Campus podcast, virtual worlds haven’t had the success rate that was predicted for them either.  The success stories in the past few years have been the ones that link people’s actual lives with their virtual lives, like facebook.  Citing the recent demise of Google’s Lively, they surmise that virtual worlds that are premised on an entirely separate realm from the actual world won’t have enough appeal to make them successful commercial ventures. Thus, they end up predicting the same fate for Second Life as Lively. However, some think Google was just testing the waters the 3D web and wasn’t really taking Lively seriously from the start.

In any case, the Digital Campus crew are talking mainly about visually and graphically based virtual worlds.  As a side note, and to distinguish them from virtual worlds like Lively and Second Life, gaming virtual worlds like World of Warcraft, which are also graphically based, seem to be doing fine–in terms of gaming itself and being the focus of anthropological field work and study.

But by mentioning the success of facebook the Digital Campus crew have placed predominantly text based virtual worlds into a separate category from graphical virtual worlds without acknowledging the difference between the two, and the many types of virtual worlds which fall under each category. A more nuanced or descriptive use of ‘virtual world’ would clear up a lot of misunderstanding surround the term.

For example, the blogosphere is text based and doesn’t seem to be in any danger of decline, in numbers or prestige.  In the introduction to Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere report, they characterise blogging as so mainstream that they need to shift their focus to the “active blogosphere”–what influences the rest of the blogosphere as well as the mainstream media. This is a long way from the problems Lively had with attracting an audience.