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24 Hours of Flickr

Today 05.05.2007 (which is one of those lovely dates which makes sense on both US and normal people’s calendars), photography sharing and community building uber-site, Flickr, is running an event called 24 Hours of Flickr. The details:

To celebrate this global community, we invite you to join us in “24 Hours of Flickr” – a day-long global photo project. On May 5, 2007, grab your camera and whatever else you need, and chronicle your day in pictures. The group’s photos will be featured at Flickr events around the world this summer and in a companion book, which will contain a selection of photographs chosen from the group…

While the day is just beginning in the US, it’s well into the night here in Perth. I’ve remembered to carry my camera some of the day, but a lot of what I did wasn’t photography-friendly (I didn’t think taking pictures in the screening of Spider-Man 3 would be overly well received!). I’ve taken a few shots of my day in a set here. Thankfully, the paucity of shots today meant is was rather easy picking my one decent shot for the Flickr pool. The only better candidate was a photo of Emily’s work-in-progress painting of Tulips, but I it seemed wrong to post a photograph of a painting for a photography pool! So here’s the image I settled on …

Wrecked Angles ...

It’s called Wrecked Angles (oh, I do love a good pun); it’s all rectangles, unfinished painted walls, security-wired windows and cracked glass. And yet, in black and white, aesthetically quite fascinating. (It was taken in Subiaco, Western Australia, but by no means indicative of the suburb!) It doesn’t really look that impressive scaled down, but take a look full-size and see what you think.

I can’t wait to see what other photos emerge during the day! 🙂

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Apparently I’m in Vogue

You’ll forgive the title to this post, I’ve never been able to let a good pun go and I doubt I’ll ever be able to use that one again. It’s true, though: I was interviewed about a month ago by Cathrin Shaer, a New Zealand-based writer for Vogue Australia who was writing a piece on life online. She was trying to do an awful lot in one article (talking about MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Second Life, etc.) but somehow my name came up and I ended up talking with her for almost an hour about the complexities of interaction in different online modes. Clearly the bit that stuck was about Second Life. Here is the snippet from that interview which appeared today in ‘A life less ordinary’ (Vogue Australia, May 2007):

Tama Leaver, a lecturer at The University of Western Australia whose research interests include exploring how humans interact with technology, has used Second Life for business meetings: “Most of the people working in my field are spread across the globe. I’ve participated in teleconferencing, but it’s better of have a conference in Second Life because you’re all in a room together, rather than just disembodied voices.” Apparently, even if you’re meeting with a bunch of serious academics, it doesn’t matter if you look like a cartoon character. “There’s a great parallel in animated films,” Leaver explains. “We understand what’s going on in an animated character’s face — most people understanding what Shrek was saying.”

Not exactly mind-blowing stuff on my part. Also, I suspect there are a few sentences Shaer could have left in since there was somewhat more space and substance between talking about academic discussion in Second Life and Shrek (for the record, I’ve never met anyone online or offline who looks like Shrek – while the facial features might be there, no one I’ve met was actually green). That said, it’s interesting to see interest in social software spreading as far as Vogue. (Although I was a little surprised that they didn’t use any Second Life screenshots for illustration – and what they did use seemed like a bad high school art collage – perhaps the Vogue graphics people didn’t actually make it in-world).

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The Misogyny of Connectivity?

In the wake of the misogynistic death threats against  blogger Kathy Sierra, and the huge debates which have ensued, Salon editor Joan Walsh has weighed in with a particularly insightful piece called quite simply ‘Men who hate women on the Web’.  One of the reasons Walsh’s piece is particularly credible is that she, too, has been on the receiving end of misogynistic comments, but has – until reading Sierra’s post – basically tried to brush them off as one of the grubby downsides of culture per se, but also a culture which is amplified by the shield of (supposed) anonymity online.  In her article Walsh makes that point explicit:

Attitudes toward women have improved dramatically just in my lifetime, but still the world has too many misogynists, and the Web has given them a microphone that lets them turn up the volume on their quavering selves, their self-righteous fury, their self-loathing expressed as hatred of women. […] I truly believe misogynist trolls are only a tiny sliver of the Web population. But I can no longer say they don’t matter, or they do no real harm. We have them here at Salon in politics and relationship threads; Sierra has them in the world of tech marketing. They’re probably not the same guys. That’s disturbing. What’s unique to the Web is that they can easily collaborate: A vicious prankster who’d like to rattle Sierra can make threats or even find and publish her address, and he might only want to scare her, not do her real physical harm. But he can be joined by an unhinged person who takes the address and acts on it.

While the specificities of who did what appear muddled at best in terms of the threats against Kathy Sierra, her post has re-raised and re-emphasised the issues of abuse, sexism and misogyny is very real ways.  Stop Cyberbullying Day was certainly one important response, but so too are the many, many conversations which have highlighted the many instances of verbal/textual abuse (albeit is less explicit terms that those against Kathy Sierra) that occur in the blogosphere and online (and, indeed, offline) culture.  I concur with Walsh that it’s important to emphasise that there are less misogynistic attitudes is the world today, but that doesn’t mean being complacent is the answer.  As we revel in the era of social software, the last week has given us pause and highlighted the need to continue to discuss the problems of sexism, misogyny and any other hate-speech, and never to presume the battle against these problems is won, otherwise web2.0 will end up with the equality0.0.

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Stop Cyberbullying Day

In the midst of the blog-storm — and increasingly, the mainstream media storm — over cyberbullying and far worse threats made against ‘A-List’ blogger Kathy Sierra, Andy Carvin has taken the initiative and declared today – Friday 30 March – Stop Cyberbullying Day. While Sierra’s situation is horrid and complicated in the same breath, the general principle that any bullying is bad, and cyberbullying seems increase the tendency to be really nasty given supposed anonymity, I think Carvin’s idea is a great one, so I am declaring my absolute for Stop Cyberbullying Day – and my ongoing disdain for bullying in any form, be it cyber or otherwise.

I wish I had more time to write a more detailed and thoughtful post, but as I have no time at all, please have a look at my links post for 28 March points to Kathy Sierra’s post which announced the ongoing threats she received to the blogosphere, and it also contains a number of the initial responses including those from Robert Scoble (who is not blogging this week, in solidarity), danah boyd (who tells her own story about bullying while decrying the abuse of Kathy Sierra) and Doc Searls (who knows a lot of the people said to be involved in abusing Kathy and seems to be doing a pretty balanced job of trying to get to the bottom of it all).

Then read and use these if you can:

    [X] Abc7News: Cyber Threats Against Well-Known Blogger has a brief overview of the threats Kathy Sierra received; it also has an unedited audio interview with Kathy Sierra about those threats – it’s well worth listening to.
    [X] Andy Carvin’s Stop Cyberbullying Ning (a mini social network for discussing these problems, and work on solutions).
    [X] Scott McLeod has created a some images you can use to show your support for Stop Cyberbullying Day (the image at the top of this post is one of Scott’s).
    [X] Read and comment on current blog posts in support of Stop Cyberbullying Day.
    [X] And, finally, please make your own blog post or other show of support if you can. Bullying hurts everyone.

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    Welcome to TamaLeaver dot Net!

    I’ve been testing and tweaking this blog for almost a month now, so I thought it was time to declare Tama Leaver dot Net open for blogging business! In the coming months (or years … or maybe more) I’ll be writing here about my thoughts on digital culture (whatever that might mean). I’m very interested in the world of blogging per se, as well as social software more generally from podcasts to YouTube, del.icio,us, Flickr and so forth.

    In my professional life I’m currently working as an Associate Lecturer (Higher Education Development) at the University of Western Australia’s Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, and have previous worked in both Communication Studies and English and Cultural Studies also at UWA.

    This blog is the successor to Ponderance, my previous Blogger blog, so if you’re after something before March 2007, it’s probably archived there. I blogged at Ponderance for almost four years, but I decided to migrate here in order to use my own WordPress installation and customise everything more fully that Blogger could allow.

    I thought I’d also use this welcome entry to signpost my other current activities and collections so they can be easily located if you were actually looking for something more specific:-
    [X] My del.icio.us bookmarks – Each day at 8am Perth time (or 9am during daylight saving; midnight GMT) a post is automatically generated and appears here with a list of my annotated bookmarks from the previous 24 hours. To explore my full bookmark collection, either scroll down on the main blog page and there’s a clickable tagcloud (a list of the frequently used tags I’ve added to my bookmarks) or go to my del.icio.us page.
    [X] My Flickr photos – My latest five photos posted to Flickr appear on the right sidebar under my blogroll or you can explore them all in my Flickr photographs.
    [X] Tama’s eLearning Blog – Part of the wonderful edublogs.org network, this blog is focused on issues about issues about using technology, web2.0 and other ‘eLearning’ ideas as part of a range of learning and teaching tools and strategies in higher education. Occasionally I’ll cross-post items both here and to my eLearning blog, but for the most part my eLearning thoughts will be posted in my edublog.
    [X] Tama Talks Blog – Which is part of the UWA postgraduate community social software system MyResearchSpace. The blog is written primarily for that community and explores why blogging matters to postgraduates.

    (If you’re subscribed to the feed from my previous blog, Ponderance, I’ve automatically updated feedburner to re-direct the to the feed from Tama Leaver dot Net, which is replacing Ponderance. If you’re still confused, see Ponderance’s retirement announcement.)

    Any questions or comments? 🙂 They’re always welcome.

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