Digital Culture Studies

1. Funny Farm: Deceptively simple. Kiss the next week of your life goodbye!

That is it. Just one link. The only link you will ever need again.

While it has been around a while in a sort of cool kids beta, it looks like Vox is finally open to the public. The good: a pretty good user interface, easy theme skinning (a great feature in wordpress, but not everyone is able to install a wordpress blog), great integration with Amazon to add book, music, and DVD collections. I have a Vox account - I wasn’t cool enough to be offered one during the long beta, but I know cool people, and wrangled an invite, friend of a friend-like.

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He hacked his brain.

I am beyond excited about this:

“The MacArthur Foundation launched its five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative in 2006 to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. Answers are critical to developing educational and other social institutions that can meet the needs of this and future generations. The initiative is both marshaling what is already known about the field and seeding innovation for continued growth.” Take a look at the list of grants and initiatives!  And the knowledge network!

If this had existed 6 months ago, my thesis would have been so much easier!

I originally started this site as a way to disseminate my research results. The topic (and thesis) is a simple one: why do college students participate in digital culture?

700 participants later, the results are astonishing, but they have also made me realize that I want to look at a wider range of participants, and then possibly break the data down into more specific chunks, maybe by gender, or class standing, and that I need to add some interview questions, so right now, I am filing a new IRB and am going to restart the project using what I have learned since finishing my thesis to make the project better.

Watch this space! It will relaunch from here.

If you are a fan of the Wiki, Wikiality cannot be beat. Make sure to run some searches. I found the “George Bush” entry to be amusing.

My Death Space: What happens to your MySpace when you die? But when you think about it, wouldn’t it be an awesome business idea to run a digital funeral home - a place that would notify all of your online forums, friends, and games, your Second life pals, your /. enemies, etc, that were gone. Maybe they could write your last blog post, tell the world what happened, why you just disappeared one day.

No one’s hotter than a New England Gansta.

World of Warcraft: a cautionary tale about the pull an escape from reality can have on you. Well, this really puts a damper on my Kingdom of Loathing addiction.

Top 10 Reasons Why Your 5 Tips About 7 Cutting-Edge Technologies will annoy me.

Many years ago I saw a hilarious comic whose name escapes me, and who my Google-Fu cannot locate, but who made laugh with one line: I am a writer. [sotto voce] I write checks. Mostly fiction.

Twenty years ago, being a ‘writer’ meant publishing - being a professional writer meant sending your work to a magazine, a journal, or a book publisher, having it accepted, seeing it in print, often months after you wrote it. Sometimes years. Or it meant you were that annoying guy that ate all the brie at every party and went on and on an on about your one unpublished but brilliant novel. But one of the things I love so much about the internet is how it makes everyone with a point of view a writer. Even me! Maybe not a good writer, but a published one.

What is even more astonishing to me is how fast the culture has changed to accommodate this shift in communication. In 1995, when I read Carolyn’s online diary, I can remember thinking to myself how big this was going to be - how monumentally huge it would be if everyone had a platform for personal expression. And then they did, and that is a story for another day, the history of online diaries, but she was the first, and I think what she did in publishing her diary online opened the floodgates for the vast scope of personal expression we see today.

One of my favourite categories in that vast scope is what I call in my bookmarks and de.licio.us account “Amateur Experts”.

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So, Myspace is so kewl, you know, because you can totally set your profile to private and then only your real friends can read your comments. Or, you know, the rest of the internet.
http://editprofile.myspace.com/user/viewallcomments.cfm?friendid=XXXXXXXX&page=1

Replace the XX’s with a myspace userid. To scroll the pages, change the page= number.

Now, go check out celebrity MySpace pages, and remind yourself how lucky you are that your friends are not sycophants and drug addicts. Or, check out your young nieces and nephews pages to see who has a girlfriend! Secret’s out, d00d.
Nothing posted online is private. Lather, rinse, and repeat. It isn’t private behind a ‘friends only’ cut, it isn’t private if your site is password protected. It isn’t private if you don’t give the URL out to anyone. It isn’t private if you use a pseudonym. It isn’t private even if you remove your content. Everything is archived, all sites have admins, all ISPs have sys. admins, and at the end of the day, nothing posted online is private.

Which is why it is in your best interest to dissuade your friends from leaving references to your drug use in your MySpace comments.

Web 2.0 is so 5 minutes ago. Today, those in the know know it is all about CHMOD 777

Ah, Fred….you had me at “breathless conflation.”

Lovely school on the hill, if I had had your templates when I was formatting my master’s thesis, maybe I wouldn’t have spent the night before it was due trying not to cry. And since you have a template called portable thesis, maybe the Very Very bad formatting error that somehow mashed my Excel spreadsheets of data into my Word document formated thesis would never have happened, if I had only used this.

,p> note to self: some day write the saddest blog post in the world about what happened when I took the GRE, what happened to my thesis the night before it was due in hard copy, and why /. saved me and the GRE testing place did not. Thesis: I love computers, but sometimes, computers do not love me back.