a thaumaturgical compendium

This sort of post has now become a staple, but here are some things I’m doing instead of blogging. I’ll try to post a little bit about these projects as they progress.

• Finishing up my new book, Search Engine Society. I’m putting the finishing touches on the index. All of it was desperately out of date the moment I wrote it, but that was inevitable. Luckily, Polity has been very good about turn-around timing on this. It’s due out in October, if the gods of printing allow. Indexing is more annoying than I thought. Can’t we just Google it?

• Research for a paper about Digg, and ratings. I had originally planned on writing this up in the form of a Dr. Suess book, but I think I’m headed for something a bit more traditional at this point. This actually follows a line of research from my dissertation, lo, so many years ago.

• Research for a paper about the use of hyperlinking in the rhetoric of extremism (and particularly racism) on the web. Again, this is a project that I’ve been thinking about for about a decade, but I’m only now getting things together for it.

• Early stages of planning to take the initial ideas I presented in a paper at NCA last year, about collaborative filtering, netroots, and the public agenda, and apply them to the presidential election. I want to finish this up sometime in, say, November.

• Organizing materials for my next book. Will be working on it over the next year or so. There are a three separate ideas I’ve been working on, but I think I’m going to look at the nexus of networked communication, learning, creativity, and government.

• I’m revising my “Intro Interactive” course. No, really. This will be the first time I have revised a course rather than starting pretty much from a clean slate. Very exciting. Hoping to outsource some of it, and interview some friends and former students to get a look at the interactive industry.

• I’m rewriting “Communication, Media, and Society” from scratch, trying to provide the means for doing my “students design the class” thing and still having it work for an online version.

• Early stages of planning for my spring courses: “Web Programming” and “Something Else.” There are several possibilities for my special topics, including: Search Engine Society (duh!), Surveillance, Virtual Worlds,

• I’ve been doing some prep on a major project, which will be my top priority when it launches later this year. Laying the foundation and doing some planning over the next few months. I’ll announce it formally on my birthday later this month.

But I haven’t been blogging. I’ll try to do better. Oh, and if I owe you something (refereeing, emails, invoices, money, the head of your sworn enemy), I’ll get to it. Just a bit bogged down right now.

Yes, I know it’s been a while. I started this semester out on the wrong foot, and have been scrambling for the last several months. If I haven’t answered your email (and there many hundred that need to be answered), I am very sorry. I promise I will get back to you. I considered email bankruptcy, but won’t go that far. If it’s time critical, email me again, since I’m working through in reverse chronological order, and that will push you to the top of the queue.

I have declared a bit of blogging bankruptcy, and abandoned some ideas for blog posts. Here is a partial list of the things I haven’t blogged, but thought about blogging:

• I was in Vancouver for IR8.0. The Mac Book Pro has developed another problem, and it is not charming—so no conference blogging. Lots of people did, though, including my anagramic colleague. Lots of stuff on Second Life, which was fun.

• Inside Higher Ed has an article that strikes a little close to home, denigrating profs with avatars, blogs, and wearing Hawaiian shirts. I far preferred the Chronicle’s advice on how James Bond can make you a better professor.

• Mutating Pictures allows human viewers to determine fitness and evolves faces from symmetric distributions of triangles. It’s already doing well. I am amazingly curious about the final outcome.

• Speaking of genetics, I am ready for the cow man.

Unlike other semesters, I haven’t been dumping my other writing and activities to this blog, for a variety of reasons, but now that I have a day of breathing space, I’ll try to start doing that again.

My partner, Jamie, was in a center-court box last night watching Sharapova trounce Vinci and Roddick fight his way past Gimelstob. I, of course, gave up my seat to make last minute changes in the syllabi for my two grad seminars this semester: Introduction to Interactive Communication and Virtual Worlds.

Introduction to Interactive Communication

This seminar is designed to provide a foundation for the MS in Interactive Communication program, introducing the theory and practice of interactive communication, and establishing the organizational and research skills demanded by the field. As a field of study and as a profession, interactive communication is only just emerging, and there is no clear fixed tradition or discipline. There is, however, a collection of ideas about what interactive communication means, and how it works. Our focus during the semester will be on engaging these ideas, providing each student with a broad idea of how to take apart social and interactive systems, how to reassemble them in more effective ways, and how to track the current state of the art in interactive technologies.

Throughout the semester, we will be touching on the meaning of interactive communication and the deeper questions of why things work the way they do. We will also be looking at how to uncover the current trends, and predict opportunities for yourself and your organization. We will not be spending as much time on the practical elements of production technique, or on structured approaches to managing such production in an organization, as these are treated in more detail in later coursework. As a survey, we are interested in the big questions, and how to integrate a broad set of ideas into a useful group of conceptual relationships for each student.

Syllabus: PDF

Virtual Worlds

Over the last year or so, there has been a great deal of attention paid to a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) called Second Life; a period of media hype that is slowly coming to a close. Despite the seeming fifteen minutes of fame enjoyed by Second Life, it remains an outstanding example of a genre of social computing that has a long history, and is likely to have a long future. Virtual environments are here to stay, and there is an opportunity right now for communication professionals who are able to understand and work within these environments. Those businesses and individuals who are using Second Life today are acquiring a set of concepts and skills that are likely to be applicable to similar environments well into the future.

This seminar is designed as a practical introduction to MUVEs, with a special focus on Second Life, which will be at once the place where we work, and one of our objects of study. We will be reading some of the theory surrounding MUVEs, as well as more practical literature. By the end of the semester, participants in the seminar should be not only competent residents and creators in Second Life, but understand the social and business dynamics of virtual worlds, and be able to plan and execute a substantial project in-world.

Syllabus: PDF

Spent part of my day in Second Life at the Best Practices in Education Conference. Was great to hear about others’ experiences. Some was stuff I had already learned the hard way, but even then, it was worth the reminder.

One of the recurring themes, which came up in Kenny Hubble’s presentation, among others, was how to provide some sense of order. Just like any class, you need to be very clear about what is and is not acceptable. Given that students feel special freedoms in virtual worlds, need to remind them to experience those freedoms (littering, dancing, stripping, sex) outside of classrooms and class times. In other words, treat it like real life. One of the suggestions was there is a “hand-raising chair” that allows students to raise their hands easily in class, for example.

On the other hand, why replicate RL settings in Second Life? Given that a lot of the rules do go out the window in second life, I think it’s important to try to keep some things the same to cushion students entry into the world. This is one of the reasons I usually make my avatar look a bit like me, and why I will likely track down that hand-raising chair. Nonetheless, I hope that we can move quickly away from these structures and that there are ways of encouraging students to take things in their own direction. Actually, one of the reasons I am eager to teach in Second Life is precisely that the “strangeness” gives students permission to experiment in ways the physical classroom may not.

That bleeds into how to sell this to administrators. A lot of people have had the experience of asking their universities for support only to get blank stares, then having an evangelist on the administrative side “get it,” and ask why the campus is so slow on getting in-world. I suspect, given that IBM and others are making virtual environments a major part of their business (at least on the training and education side), campuses will be slowly coming around. But the recurring theme is that you cannot tell people what Second Life is, they have to experience it. Actually, I’m not sure that is entirely the case. I think good use of video might be an even better stand-in, from the perspective of persuading institutional involvement. I’m going to record much of what we do in our fall class and what other people are doing, and try to put together a “best of” reel to help sell the idea of an island in-world.

Anthony Curtis, a journalism prof at UNC, writes a bit about his experience of teaching a journalism class in Second Life. It’s an interesting report. Now that this semester is winding to a close, I’m thinking in more detail about the Fall course in Second Life, and how to organize it to minimize the learning curve. I’ll probably be leading students through some fairly guided activities to begin with, and coopting the most able students to be mentors. It seems like the best approach.

From Curtis’s description:

To carry out the project, students enthusiastically climbed what for some of them was a steep learning curve into the SL world. After a period of exploring for familiarization, they individually identified possible article coverage of several unusual and interesting areas of social, cultural, political and commercial life. They proceeded to locate reporting resources including SL residents to interview, places to investigate, and sites to photograph.

Kevin Warwick is giving a talk entitled “Upgrading Humans: Why Not?” this Monday at 7 PST in the main auditorium on Uvvy Island in Second Life. I’ve always been a fan of many of the transhumanists. I tend to be too much an adherent of the appropriate use of technology to fit in well with the that crowd: too much the humanist to make a good transhumanist. Nonetheless, it seems every year I seem more a tech promoter and less a critic.

There is some discussion in several circles, for example, now critical of user-created media. Trebor others have been discussing this a bit on the iDC list recently. I find it very difficult to associate the work of blogs, Flickr, and YouTube with labor, despite the fact that it is making the systems’ owners collectively very rich, very quickly. I won’t sketch out a complete argument, because I don’t have one, but I’ll start with a provocation:

Marx would have dug whuffie.

I asked my class a few weeks ago what they would do if they won $10 million in the lottery (the amount most say would be necessary to live comfortably). How they would fill their days. (The course is related to the development of User-Created Media.) Of course, I suspect the reality is that you would invest the money, but the question was what you would do with your time. I noted that smoking marijuana all day and playing X-box was a perfectly acceptable response, and a few people in the class agreed that this would be their aim. Most, however, suggested that they would make movies, do voiceovers for cartoons, take up photography more actively, teach in underprivileged areas, become an interior decorator, or flip real estate (not merely speculating, but creatively reforming).

After work, we still work, we just don’t have to any more. I think a lot of the contributions to open source projects, and a lot of the videos of people on YouTube, reflect the dawning of a new kind of work for the privileged classes. I think Google reflects one vision of that workers utopia, though there are others. I also think that the cult of celebrity that many have seen as disturbing among the youth suggests a post-career view of what work and money mean. Kids would rather be famous than rich, because they already know they will be rich. And some of them are right to make that assumption.

It’s a natural outgrowth of the global hollowing out of the middle-class. Many people don’t have to work. Or, rather, their work doesn’t feel much like work. It is dependent on their ability to be creative, and the means of that production is fairly unalienable. It’s not the end of capitalism—it’s all built on a working class that is more shrouded from its role in society than ever before. But how strange it would be if the revolution came not from below, but trickled down.

The media has discovered Second Life in a big way. So, I’m chatting with people about it. Here is an article in the New Haven Register (but I do have land!), and below is a piece for the local NBC affiliate. Camera adds 100 pounds, as they say. Oh, wait, they don’t say that?