Digital Culture Studies

I have always wanted to plot the migratory course of social networking software -the groups of people who started at Six Degrees, and then made the decision to use Friendster, the jump to Orkut, the small subset of friends on Small World, the ones who drifted from pitas.com to blogger software on their own domain, who then swarmed to livejournal, something they never would have done in 99 when it debuted, but now is old enough (in web years) to be retro, and then the splitoff to deadjournal and others like it after the breastfeeding icons controversy. Other packs ended up at Vox, some opted out of blogging entirely and jumped to Facebook and MySpace, others hit wordpress and blogspot along the way, but in general, I suspect that people, as they migrate through social networking software sites, are retaining a high percentage of links to the same group of people - their digital tribe - as they pass through each iteration of social networking online.

And then everyone was at Twitter, and now twittering is passe and the people who loved it most complain about the overloaded servers and unexplained outages, and now plurk.com is the next big thing, with its gorgeous timeline visuals. It will be interesting to see what kind of retention plurk has from twitter networks.

Alia Sabur is the world’s youngest college professor, beating a record set 300+ years ago by Colin Maclaurin. She was hired for her first professorship 3 days shy of her 19th birthday. In the time leading up to the start of her new position, she taught in New Orleans, at Southern University, an HBCU that is still struggling after hurricane Katrina. So, she’s smart and generous!

The wiki page on Colin Macluarin, the previous record-holder is pretty funny - after defending a master’s thesis entitled The Power of Gravity, he went on to study divinity, which naturally lead to a professorship in mathematics when he was 19.

Of course, he had an edge on Alia - he had 300 years less knowledge to learn! On the other hand, what does studying gravity look like when you personally know Isaac Newton?

Tomorrow night (6/17) Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet…And How to Stop It, will be on Colbert. This should be fun.

I bought a copy of this book for my summer reading list because I am oldskool and like to hold books in my hand to read them, but you can download and read it for free directly from its website, and if so inclined, there is a group annotation in progress.

Its the first day of summer vacation, and I just finished a seminar paper so fun that I cannot let it go. To that end, I am seeking out sociology/anthropology/gender studies academics who study child beauty pageants. I know these people must exist, but I have no idea who they are. Do you? Let me know, please!