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September 13, 2006

Blog politics, online identity business, game player labour

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Trackbacking to last week, conference souvenirs from Oxford, with the Media Lab crowd in mind as main audience, hence the emphasis on new media. The Media Change and Social Theory Conference, 6-8 Sept 2006, was organised by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change.

Location overview

St Hugh's, above, was a quiet, idyllic campus area with an extensive lawn and garden area. Picknicking on the soft green matt in hot weather was a daily pleasure. Even considering the English style menu: potato crisps, white bread, blueberry muffins, every day :)

I loved Oxford the town (greetings to Anna A.) Historically beautiful, lively and modern at the same time. Not at all the sleepy academic village I expected. I want to go back some day and explore - now I just spent one afternoon in town as there was no space for tourism in the conference programme. (Skip class, moi?)

Conference overview

This was an excellent quality media studies conference with emphasis on social theory. (The usual I guess would be cultural studies.) It was good to see that media studies, traditionally meaning mass media, now also hosts a lot of research on new - digital, networked, fragmented audience, whatever you want to define it as - media, typically presented by young researchers. This stuff is interesting to arts and design folks, too. The level of empirical work and reporting on the cultural and social aspects of media making and use was generally outstanding.

Concerning new media, especially games, I noted a certain disillusionment and critical attitude related to the business. A common reminder was that "interaction" often means routine, and "participation" labour for someone else's commercial benefit. Many researchers called attention to the money-making side of things, instead of just celebrating play and playfulness, or the illusion that consumers would become "producers" just by "participating" in transforming a product. However, it was also noted, that analysts' views on what is exploitation are often different from the game players' views.

Summaries

The presentations could be categorized roughly into two categories. The theory-focused ones elaborated on classics such as Habermas, Bourdieu, Foucault, Frankfurt school, relating them to various media themes. Presentations based on empirical work varied from reality-tv reception to mobile phone ring tones. Below, I've summarized two presentations in this latter category that I got the most out of. Other interesting young presenters, if you'd like to check them/their work out, were:

Robert Jones from NYU who gave a descriptive, informative presentation on machinima. Robert framed it as transformative play, that is, fans changing the system within which play takes place, leaving their mark on it. He pointed out that machinima serves game developers' interests as the intellectual property remains in the game engine.

David Nieborg from UvA who presented on PC game expansion packs. The packs are a form of serialisation of the games, he said. The gaming community exerts implied pressure on players to buy the packs, although the packs are critiziced for their often poor quality. Game reviewers also contribute to this "social control" of games consumption.

Olli Sotamaa from TaY who talked about games economy, through the example of The Movies and players' contribution/labour as part of the game.

To see full programme please look at
http://www.cresc.man.ac.uk/events/sept06/Programmemain1.htm#WedSessions1

On blogs and participation in public sphere
by Eugenia Siapera, Leicester Univ. PhD student

Eugenia questioned whether blogs really are an efficient channel to influence "offline politics" (not just party politics but different social movements), i.e. to participate in the public sphere (social theory jargon :) ).

To start, she observed three perspectives in current blogs literature:

Idealism: blogs are the most free media form
Nihilism: blogs contribute to the "nothingness", the banality, triviality of the internet (Geert Lovink quoted by Eugenia)
Pragmatism: Basically blogs are a positive phenomenon but there are some problems related

Eugenia wished to problematize the idea of participation by asking: Participation in what, and what for? According to her, blogging as such does not qualify for participation or for enhancing democracy. To her, "participation", often seen as something good as such, simply means "more network-type associations and more widespread access and engagement with digital networks." Instead, Eugenia called for something more creative, boundary-breaking, challenging, something that would genuinely "enable the unheard". Now, she saw blog culture fitting neatly within the capitalist consumer society, introducing nothing fundamentally creative, new, in the area of participation to the public sphere.

Members in the audience questioned this observation by pointing out there are different kind of blogs, many of which do not claim or aim to "participate" but just perform or represent the blogger. Eugenia was critical of whether there is such a thing as "just" perform or represent, also, her presentation was targeted more on the views and conceptualisations on blogs than what existed on the blogoshpere at the moment.

Anyhow, a thought-provoking, passionate presentation.

On online identities and related commercial interests by
Alice Marwick, NYU PhD student, consultant

This was an engaged and well-informed presentation on online identities from the 90's to the present state.

Alice first reminded us of how identity in online communities was discussed in the 90s research literature (Turkle, Haraway, Rheingold, Stone): through the disembodiment hypothesis and utopian ideals of online interaction (Negroponte, Rushkoff). Today, writers on internet (Kolko, Ullman, Nakamura) remind us that race, gender and sexuality are still central issues also when related to online identities.

She observed four significant changes over 10 years:

- People appear as themselves on the net more than in the 90s
- It has become more tricky to define when one is online, when offline, with different wireless online opportunities
- The internet has gone through commercialisation and there are millions more users and thus a very different demographic than 10 years ago
- Self-representation has become visual instead of textual with graphics, animation, online games, video, and music

Alice noted that people mostly use commercial applications for presenting their identity online, and companies exploit this with a number of techniques. We should be aware of and concerned about these, she said: data mining, aggregation, and broking, producing micro-targeted advertising (like in gmail at present) and behavioural marketing and targeting (like when on site, sms ads), as Web 2.0 development and discussion goes on.

Alice wasn't the only one who mentioned some big polemic MySpace has caused in USA. You probably know more about this than me.

More in Alice's blog www.tiara.org/blog (where she also has an extensive bibliography the topic.)

I'll leave you with a note on a more traditional medium - in Oxford I saw the biggest, brightest, loudest, most fun-looking "tivoli," as we say in Finland, ever.

Oxford tivoli_3.JPG

Posted by hrantavu at 03:53 PM

London life

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Greetings from the island state! My current preoccupation in short: above is where I live now, and below is where I wish to live soon. Soho fans, sorry, I can't wait to move to Highgate.

Odottelen muuttoa. En osaa olla turistina, kaipaan asettua, ja silloin Soho on ruuhkaa, ihmisiä, turismia, huumehörhöjä, sireenejä. Ei terasseja, pubeja, ihmisiä, kauppoja, kaunista säätä, kiireetöntä kuljeskelua. Siispä nökötän boksissa, roikun netissä, luen White teethiä ja lämmittelen Sainsburyn intialaisia mikroaterioita. Odottelen, jopa viihdyn. Highgate mielessäin.

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Posted by hrantavu at 03:29 PM