Digital Culture Studies

I have this idea just swirling around in my head about how the web makes history editable in a way that it never has been, before. Yes, history, written by the victors, but now? History is written (and edited) by anyone who wants to, really, which is one of the reasons that  I applaud danah boyd’s idea to start recording the history of social networking sites (see this post) - get it down now, so that there is a record of what happened and when. What got me thinking about this is a blog I happened on the other day - really, a great essay about the importance of blogging - so well written that I bookmarked it to post here later, except….to make his point that he was an ‘expert’ in the field of blogging, the author pointed out that he was one of the ‘first bloggers’, and his blog was started on a Diaryland site in the mid 90s.

Which makes him an expert in revisionist history, since blogs didn’t exist in the mid-90s ( it was all about the personal home page back then!***). And semantics aside about what the form is called, Diaryland itself was created in September 1999. Needless to say, I am not linking the essay, or the author, even though I am intensely curious about how he has managed to bend time itself to make his claims true.

***randomly, now - Does anybody remember the documentary movie called  Home Page, from 1998? I have a copy, and love it, mostly because I was such a fan of Justin Hall and his links.net webpage, and of course, everyone loved Carl Steadman, who definitely wins the ‘longest time between redesigns’ award, since i just googled him to get that link, and found his site exactly the way I remember reading it back in the late 90s. Can you even imagine trying to make a movie like that today, now that CMC is completly mainstream, and with the advent of vlogs?

Once, I ate lunch with Satre. I asked him: “What caused Roquentin so much anguish?” I really wanted to confirm what I already know: Roquentin saw the bare existence of life, that which draws back the curtains of absurdity. Sartre looked up at me with one eye, while looking at the diners next to use with the other. He responded in a way that shook me to the very core, in a way that I would never have imagined:…”no, actually, it was that band, Hinder.”

–review of the Hinder Album Extreme Behaviour, by username Aetius.

So…would you buy this album after reading that review?

The 13 most embarassing web moments: interestingly, I just saw #6 for the first time, at a talk given by Jonathan Gratch. I am currently reading Convergence Culture, by Henry Jenkins, and now, everything is convergence to me.

Including this: UIC is exploring the possibility of setting up a college endorsed Livejournal site [via gapers block]. What makes it so fascinating to me is that I have been watching and studying college livejournal communities for a number of years, and this is the first time that I have ever seen a college officially get involved with these dynamic, student-driven communities. Good for UIC! Also, and off-topic, is it just me, or does Brad Fitzpatrick look like Jim from The Office in his user pic?

Information Architecture: Yahoo’s network diagram. one word summary: wow.

Some people write novels in November; others participate in Movember.

How to avoid having someone sit next to you when flying. via [lifehacker]

Speaking of flying, knee defenders - I wonder if other people would catch on if I started using these?

In 1997, I watched as a number of the personal websites that I read particpated in a group notebook project, each decorating one page of a blank notebook, scanning in and posting the page they had decorated, before mailing the moleskine off to the next participant. The premise was a simple one - a moleskine, mailed from one person to the next, and each recipient decorating and/or filling up one page, and then finding someone to whom it should be mailed next, someone that they only knew in the context of reading each other’s personal web pages.
Two themes quickly emerged: the notion of connecting one’s screen life with one’s offline life, vis a vis giving out a real name/mailing address, to the person who wanted to send you the journal, and the notion of exclusivity and how that affects online relationships. That second theme is a whole other post!
It was the beginning of deciding who to trust, oneline - who could have your real name, who could place you in ‘the big blue box’. These experiments continued, in various formats, including two of my favourites - Where’s George, and Dropspots. I just got a Where’s George bill the other day, and dutifully logged in to register it. This is the second bill I have recieved with a Where’s George stamp on it, and as it turns out, the person that registered it has registered more than thirty four thousand bills. That is some serious commitment to outsider social connection.

Dropspots is new, and a little more personal than wheresgeorge - a harkening back to the whole moleskine journal idea. In their FAQ, they say this: Leave things of little or no financial value. Leave things that you’d like people to add to, or modify in some way. It is amazing to me the lengths to which humans will go in order to connect with one another.

The Museum of Modern Betas: a site dedicated to listing web-based betas.

360 Digital Influence: An exploration of what influences us.

Science is beautiful 

Danah Boyd put together a wiki documenting the timeline of social networking software. It is funny to think that widespread use of the web is only about 11 years old, and that if we don’t write these things done, they will be lost. Funny, in the I was a Classics major in undergrad and we used to drive ourselves nuts thinking about how much was lost because nobody writes down what is most obvious in their day to day lives.

Wikipedia has a great list of social networking sites, for those of you who think that MySpace and Facebook invented social networking :)

A nice, neat list of higher education associations. I had to do this, because I am getting all the acronyms mixed up!

Sleepy Urbanite: Cell Phone Art
The Kings Of MySpace (slightly NSFW, very funny)

Video The Vote: Stopping voter suppression, by observingthe vote and sharing the results - on election day.