Obama’s victory has people celebrating across the world for so many reasons, but given my preoccupations, it should come as no surprise that part of my joy comes from his decidedly forward-thinking policies toward digital culture. As, for example, Barry Saunders has argued in his ABC story:

The exemplar of a successful political campaign’s use of social media is … Obama’s campaign. Foregoing public funding and the big money of lobbyists, Obama has raised enormous amounts of money from primarily small donors, at last count over $US390 million. Obama claims this will allow him to reduce lobbyist influence in government, though inevitably, the truth is somewhat more complex than that.Obama’s campaign has also make powerful use of social networking tools such as Twitter, MySpace-style social networking sites and even an iPhone application. This commitment to using tools to engage with a primarily younger, tech savvy audience, combined with an commitment to Network Neutrality and a progressive tech policy (Barack Obama on technology and innovation – PDF) has certainly helped his support amongst younger voters. McCain’s admission that he doesn’t know how to use a computer hasn’t helped his regain any of that support.

Indeed, Obama’s use of digital networks wasn’t just an organizational tool, but an avenue to encourage the creativity of his supporters, as Sarah Lai Stirland noted in Wired a few days ago:

Obama’s online success dwarfed his opponent’s, and proved key to his winning the presidency. Volunteers used Obama’s website to organize a thousand phone-banking events in the last week of the race — and 150,000 other campaign-related events over the course of the campaign. Supporters created more than 35,000 groups clumped by affinities like geographical proximity and shared pop-cultural interests. By the end of the campaign, myBarackObama.com chalked up some 1.5 million accounts. And Obama raised a record-breaking $600 million in contributions from more than three million people, many of whom donated through the web. … In many ways, the story of Obama’s campaign was the story of his supporters, whose creativity and enthusiasm manifested through multitudes of websites and YouTube videos online. It even resulted in volunteer contributions like the innovative Obama ’08 iPhone and iTouch application that enabled owners to mobilize their friends and contacts in battleground states through the Apple devices.

On the digital front, Obama’s administration is already looking very promising from an open access perspective, and, as Barry notes above, may actually enshrine Net Neutrality, too! Given the deft hand the Obama team have used in engaging with young voters via digital tools and communities, it’s probably no surprise to hear that Obama’s victory speech has already clocked over 100,000 downloads via Bittorrent networks!

Meanwhile, Republican party insiders seems to be falling over themselves to point out how ‘ignorant’ Sarah Palin really is, but what does that actually say about the presidential candidate that chose her as a running mate? Oh well, it really doesn’t matter any more; I can’t really see predictions of Palin 2012 being much to worry about.

Perhaps of more concern for the hip and ironic youth of today is a piece by Dan Kois in the NY Times’ Culture Vulture asking ‘Can ‘The Daily Show’ Survive the Barack Obama Presidency?‘ What will Jon Stewart and his team satirize in a hopeful, forward-thinking, globally-minded American under Obama? I suspect there’ll still be a few things worth making fun of, but I’m sure Jon Stewart would agree, if it came down to The Daily Show or Obama, Stewart would still be voting Obama! Besides which, plenty of Americans are still doing really stupid things; drowned out by all the celebrations was the fact that in the same electoral process, Californians voted to remove the rights of gay people to marry; I think The Daily Show team might just have some new targets!

The video, though, that really caps the viral video war which has been one of the most engaging elements of the presidential campaigning, the video that shows behind a sexed-up meme can be real joy, is this little capture of Obama girl celebrating becoming President-Elect girl in Times Square …

[Via] [Image: 'Barack Obama: A mosaic of people' by tsevis CC BY NC SA]

I haven’t been blogging much recently, but I have the best reason of all: Emily and I are absolutely delighted to announce the arrival of our son, Henry Alexander.  He arrived in the world a tiny little thing, but he’s the most amazing sight we’ve ever seen and, as I’m sure every parent thinks, he’s the most beautiful little man in the entire world!  The word hardly does the experience justice, but we’re are both euphoric beyond belief!

Oh, and blogging may just be a bit sporadic for a while!

[This photograph is © All rights reserved, and is an exception to the Creative Commons license otherwise covering this blog.]

Yesterday I was part of a team presenting a lecture on the History of Computer Games (a nice small topic) and we chose to structure the lecture via our own gaming histories, so I touched on Defender in the arcades, the Vic 20 (and cassette tape drives!) before spending most of my time talking about the Commodore Amiga computer. The Amiga was the significant computer of my youth (late 1980s, early 90s) and as it seemed to have a similar importance to a lot of my friends. Being new to games studies at large I presumed there would be articles on the history of the computer, the games, the role of software piracy (a big issue, even then, long before the interwebs were there to blame) and the graphics power of the platform. To my surprise, there is almost nothing written at all (hello graduate students of the world, are any of you writing this history right now??).

I did find a few things, though, and thought I’d collate them here. Firstly, Jeremy Reimer has been slowly writing a column on his version of the Amiga’s history over at Ars Technica, with seven parts so far: Genesis; The Birth of the Amiga; The First Prototype; Enter Commodore; PostLaunch Blues; Stopping the Bleeding; and Game On! so far. Reimer’s history is very producerly, but nevertheless well written and an engaging read.

An important parallel to the production narrative is the emergence of the Amiga demoscene and game piracy, a history often linked but not always. This history is much, much harder to find although exotica (not a porn site, I should add, but rather about exotic computers) has collated a fantastic scene history, year by year, which you can access through their site. In some ways the demoscene is one of the most significant ancestors of both the open source, public domain and other freeware movements of today, and the great media bugbear, the pirates (although obviously mainly in terms of videogames at this point).

The one source that I couldn’t access in time, but I’ve not ordered and can’t wait to read, is a history of Commodore (mainly the C64 and Amiga) called On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore (which you can also get from Amazon). The book seems to have gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews on Amazon, so I have high hopes but I try and post something more once I’ve had a read of it.

Beyond that, though, Amiga fans of old should probably take a look at the emulators of the world (for Windows users, WinUAE works rather well) although you may have to once again resort to piracy to get a lot of your old favourite games – there doesn’t appear to be many other options right now! If you want to remember those amazing visuals and sounds, you can find videos of a lot of demos and games captured on YouTube. Zipping through 23 minutes of Defender of the Crown certainly fires a few old neurons!

One hope I do have is Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort’s new game studies series Platform Studies from MIT Press. Platform Studies looks to be an exploration of the affordances of computer platforms as part of contemporary history (so, looking at what the technology of certain platforms actually allowed programmers to do, what it stopped them doing, and how that influenced software design, among other things). A Platform Studies book on the Amiga must surely be on the cards somewhere in the rapidly emerging world of game studies! (I hope!)

Update: The Classic Amiga website has a huge archive of old Amiga demos, music and some games well worth checking out if you’ve fond memories of the Amiga years.

Hello to anyone visiting from the Self.Net: Identity in the Digital Age course. The slides from my guest lecture are embedded here:

If you click the link and follow back to Slideshare, you’re welcome to download the slides for your own uses if that would be helpful.

Some of the links discussed today that you might want to explore:
* Rebecca’s Pocket (Rebecca Blood)
* Dear Raed (Salam Pax)
* http://jilltxt.net/ (Jill Walker Rettberg)
* Larvartus Prodeo (Mark Bahnisch et al)
* The Daily Kos

Comments or questions are welcome!

What if World of Warcraft was real? What would people play to relax and escape? World of Workcraft is the answer …

30 … 20 … 10 … nothing. That’s the experience fans outside of the US had earlier today when Joss Whedon’s web-based musical webisode experiment Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog went live using Hulu, a video-streaming service geo-locked to stream to US IP addresses only:

Now, it’s not unusual for content to be limited to US internet addresses, especially television, but Dr Horrible is a different kettle of fish. Joss Whedon has done an amazing job of courting the fans and getting them on side to view promote (and eventually buy) Dr Horrible’s adventures, so it came as something of a shock to most international fans (with whom Whedon usually has a pretty good rapport) when discovered they weren’t able to get the free stream of Dr Horrible’s first act (or even buy the episodes on iTunes).

On Whedonesque – the main Joss Whedon appreciation blog (to which Joss posts from time to time) – the thread initially celebrating Dr Horrible’s release was inundated with international fans lamenting the fact that they couldn’t view the new web-based show. Dr Horrible’s Facebook page and MySpace page similarly received a vitriolic helping of international fan dismay!

Now, if Dr Horrible was an NBC or Viacom property, that would be the end of the story. However, given Joss Whedon’s track record, it seems reasonable that the geo-blocking was unintentional or accidental. And now we can see that’s exactly right … on various forums Whedon’s team have posted that they’re trying to get a globally-viewable version up. It seems that this may very well be the case that the tools for online distribution simply aren’t quite up to the demands being put on them by content creators. Ironically, this experience might actually lead to more fans working out how to circumvent Hulu’s geo-restrictions as Whedon has sided with the fans once more and in the short term the official Dr Horrible Twitter feed has linked to instructions on how to circumvent Hulu! Indeed, for long-time Whedon fans this might be reminiscent of a moment in 1999 when Whedon encouraged Canadian viewers to “bootleg that puppy” after Fox postponed the season three finale due in the wake of the Columbine shootings.

For Dr Horrible, it has been a rough start, but Whedon’s track record and the excitement from US fans who’ve already enjoyed Dr Horrible leave the rest of us waiting eagerly, knowing that Whedon and his team are doing all they can and will surely learn a lot from this experience. (And thus, I should add, we can reasonably expect that acts two and three of Dr Horrible will, indeed, get a simultaneous global release!).

Update: Drs Horrible (aka Mutant Enemy) have risen to the challenge, and the first act of Dr Horrible is now viewable by everyone! Go watch Act One (’tis funny!).

Update 2: It seems that Dr Horrible’s first day had one more obstacle: popularity.  Dr Horrible’s servers were completely overloaded and the site diappeared for a while, but now they’ve moved onto “monster servers” so all should be good … or is that evil?

I’m delighted to see that Jill Walker Rettberg’s book Blogging has just been released. I had the pleasure of reading much of this book in draft form last year while Jill was a guest researcher here in Communication Studies here at UWA, and on the basis of what I read I’m confident this book will be extremely well received. Jill’s work is neither a simple how-to guide (of which there are many), nor is it a book on blogging which presumes readers are already blogosphere aficionados. Rather, Jill has managed to write an engaging and critical book which situates blogging within broader histories – such as the role of blogging in terms of literacy, the evolution of citizen journalism, blogs and/as social networks, and even ethical frameworks which examine advertising and authenticity in blogs. More to the point, for someone new to blogs as an idea, or in practice, Blogging offers a world of insight and experience distilled into a readable and engaging form.

The table of contents and the (extremely positive) early reviews of Blogging are available on Polity’s website, and it can be ordered now from Amazon UK or will be available from Amazon US in about two months.

I strongly recommend you read Blogging for yourself!

Unless you’ve been hiding under a digital rock, you’d know that the best browser in the world has released an even better incarnation: Firefox 3 is here.  I could write about all of its improvements, but you can get a fuller version here, suffice it to say it runs faster, takes a lot less memory (20 tabs open suddenly takes about 300mg less RAM for me!) and has some spiffy new security features.  And let’s not forget, it’s an open source creation, made by the people, for the people!

To celebrate, Mozilla are encouraging people to download Firefox 3 today, attempting to break the Guinness World Record for most downloaded software in a 24hour period.  For those of us in Perth, that 24 hours runs from 1am Wed 18 June until 12.59am Thurs 19 June.  So, be part of a World Record and download now!  I was the 29005th person to download from Australia, so I know there are a few Aussies who could download yet! And just in case you need one last ounce of motivation, downloading FireFox 3 today will get you a cute little certificate:

Seriously: go download it now.

During the last semester, I’ve been coordinating a fun little honours unit which was called ‘Creative Selves’.  One of the main ideas we explored was the ways in which ‘creativity’ is defined and deployed so differently across all sorts of areas from the creative industries to education and marketing.  I wish I’d had this little video to start off that conversation:

[Via]

A simply beautiful design for a future Floating New Orleans as noted by Inhabitat:

It’s been almost three years since New Orleans weathered Katrina’s wrath, and debate still rages over plans to reconstruct the sunken city. Myriad options have surfaced ranging from rebuilding the levees to designing storm resistant structures to not rebuilding at all. Here’s an approach that endeavors to ride the river rather than stem it’s course. Harvard Graduate School of Design students Kiduck Kim and Christian Stayner have conceived of a Floating City that will “rise safely in an Archimedean liquid landscape.”

So elegant, so well designed and such a good way to work with the natural demands of a place rather than fortify against it. [More] [Via]

On Tuesday, the students from my Digital Media class, as well a few invited guests and colleagues, enjoyed a screening of the Best 8 Student News Projects from the unit. This project, the first major assignment for the unit, takes place after 4 weeks of workshops which introduce digital video cameras, sound recording and (very) basic lighting, non-linear editing and copyright in media production. It’s a bit of a whirlwind, but the culmination of these workshop is a project in which students, working in groups of 4 or 5, get exactly one week to produce a 3 minute news story on the basis of pre-assigned topics (all of which are based on relevant local issues).

Once the projects are completed, part of the feedback process is not just comments from myself or Christina (who is tutoring half of the classes, I’m tutoring the other half) – although we do give a fair bit of written feedback – but we also have a reflective seminar where the projects completed by the groups in these seminars (there are 4 groups in each seminar) are viewed and the other members of the seminar offer written and verbal feedback. I find this is always a very rewarding process, as students often engage more directly with peer feedback. To top it off, at the end of each seminar (there are 8 ) each seminar votes and the best project, along with the top from the other seminars, become those which make up the Best of Student News screening. While I am a little hesitant to place too much weight on the ‘best’ projects – learning is, after all, not a competition – students nevertheless respond well to this voting process. I suspect the idea of them deciding the best projects rather than the course staff is very appealing! Then, in the Best of Student News screening, the students get to vote once more and select their choice for the Best Student News Project of the year.

I have to say, I think the level at which students produced their projects this year has been outstanding. Even though most of them have learnt their media production skills over 4 one and a half hour workshops, many of these projects can stand up against the work of professionals who’ve had 3 year of training. The Best Project for the year, as selected by their peers, shows that humour – when used properly – really is one of the universally appealing elements of media. So, without any further ado, this year’s Best Student Project takes a comical look at the role of community radio in the era of media conglomeration.

Community Radio

At the screening, there is also a Staff Award given the the project which got the highest overall mark. This award went to the group behind a technically outstanding project which explored whether Australia’s young Olympians are adequately prepared to be thrust into the media spotlight at the Beijing Olympics.

Young Olympians and the Media Spotlight?

There are two other projects from the screening I wanted share: one takes a look at the proposed redevelopment of the Perth inner city foreshore, and the other asks to what extent Earth Hour is a genuine attempt at ecological change.

Perth Foreshore Redevelopment

Earth Hour 2008

One other noteworthy aspect of these projects, and of many others students created for the course, is that after our discussions on copyright, each of the projects above has selected to place their finished work under a Creative Commons license. Among other things, this suggests that far from the end of the conversation, some of these student projects may, indeed, have an interesting life being screened and remixed in different settings.

The students in this unit are now working hard on their second project, which is explores more specifically the affordances of digital video on the web, and I have to say, having just heard their Pitches for these projects, I’m really exciting to see the next projects as they’re completed!

While there are many elements of the film Gattaca which are realistically extrapolated from contemporary society, I really thought that scanning someone else’s DNA to determine how romantically or sexually compatible they may or may not be with you was one of the more fictional elements. It seems I was wrong. Enter “Scientific Match“, which describes itself thus:

ScientificMatch uses your DNA to maximize the chances of finding chemistry—actual, physical chemistry—with your matches. We look at your personal values to help you find a soul mate. And our in-depth background checks provide one of the safest—and most honest—places for your search.

We faithfully guard your DNA. Your genetic information is never made public—not even you can see it. Our CLIA/ASH-accredited lab never knows whose DNA it’s analyzing, and it follows all HIPAA privacy guidelines. We only analyze a very few of your immune system genes—not your whole genetic makeup. And your DNA sample is destroyed after we’re done with it. Your genetic privacy is much more vulnerable when you get a haircut, or drink from a glass in a restaurant!

Despite their tome on privacy, I tend to think they protest too loudly. For anyone who would actually consider using such a service, all I can suggest is you avail yourselves of the lovely new BluRay version of Gattaca first and think whether you really want DNA matching to rule your love life.

[Via Rachael Joy on Seesmic]

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot this semester has been the way my teaching does – or doesn’t – encourage my students to develop that elusive, highly ambiguous but universally sought-after quality of creativity. I’ve been running two units – Digital Media, which is a relatively large second year unit (about 140 students) with a fairly hefty hands-on component; and a far smaller honours unit called Creative Selves which is specifically about exploring the way creativity is thought about, situated and can ultimately be harnessed in the world of work (or, at least, the world outside of formal education).

Even though creativity is often associated with the romantic ideal of the lone creative genius, one of the contradictions I’ve been quite aware of, and something that has come up in both units, is that both individual and group creativity is often meaningfully enhanced and provoked when students are thinking about the audience that might ultimately view/experience/interact with their creative work. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise since over the last 4 years I’ve often encouraged (and occasionally mandated) that students blog their work for just that reason. In so many cases, when the potential audience for a work – written, audio, video or whatever else – stops being just the marker or examiner and starts being a potentially global community, students tend to push themselves to work that little bit harder. Occasionally one or two students have suggested this is unnecessarily stressful, but 99% of the time when students are faced with the large potential audience that the internet provides, they step up to the challenge.  There are other clear advantages of getting students to create in the public sphere, too, such as those outlined by Jason Mittell:

One of my pet peeves about teaching is that often you get wonderful student work that is, by design, written for an audience of one, and has no lingering presence beyond the semester. By asking students to blog, share, and otherwise publish their work, it both raises the bar for their own sense of engaging a community with their ideas, as well as offers an opportunity for faculty to publicize their excellent work.

Mittell has written a series of posts showcasing some of the impressive work students have made as part of his Media Technology course this past semester.  They range from podcasts which interrogate something specific about audio, to video-games based shorts (sort of machinima, but not in the Red Vs Blue sense – more videos which mix and match game footage in different ways to highlight a particular critical or creative point).  One assignment I particularly liked was the use of video remixes, or mashups, which included one student effort which remixed current blockbuster trailers – and a ubiquitous iPhone ad – to create an overhyped trailer for technological convergence itself:

Another student collaboration I’ve come across recently is Shake Girl, The Graphic Novel.  This graphic novel was a collaboration between 17 Stanford creative writing, art and design students who’ve produced a moving and provocative story which ultimately ends up being a heart-wrenching tale highlighting the terrible phenomenon of acid attacks on women in Cambodia.  This is no two-dimensional moral rant, though: it’s a thoroughly engaging story, with sophisticated characterisation which envelops the reader in the story only to shock them with the protagonist’s fate.  In their About section, one note rang particularly true for me, regarding the challenges but also the substantial rewards which come from successful creative collaborations between students:

The process of collaboration – we think all of our students will agree – was both one of the most frustrating and exciting experiences of our lives. A lot of the first in the first two weeks, much of the second in the last four. Those of us writing the script seemed to trip over one another in the early stages. We wrote, researched, rewrote, tossed drafts aside, argued, yelled sometimes, tossed our hands up in the air, and then started over. The illustrators waited patiently, until patience ran out, and we were finally left with this mission statement: 1. We want to get this project completed, and 2. We want to make everyone moderately happy.

And with that, we made the jump to light speed. How many late-night hours did we draw, redraw, rewrite, design, redesign, and mostly… really enjoy each others company, efforts, and camaraderie?

All I can say is that Shake Girl definitely highlights an impressively successful student collaboration! [Via BBoing]

This graphic novel also reminds me on one idea for a small-scale creative project I’ve always wanted to do especially with a large first-year class.  Many of you will recall the fabulous Theory.org.uk Theorist Trading Cards, which were essentially bubblegum cards featuring well-known cultural theorists.  In a large first-year class where new theorists, ideas and concepts are introduced for the first time, I suspect that if students generated their own cards as part of tutorial presentations, this would be a great way to creatively get them reading and thinking about the main features, and differences, between the writers and works they encounter.  As an added bonus, these trading cards could be collated online and serve, to some extent, as useful prompts when students are revising for exams.

For a few more examples of engaging creative work, Siva Vaidhyanathan has posted two nifty videos created by students in his Introduction to Digital Media course: Restricted Knowledge? University Bandwidth Regulation and Facebook World.

Along a similar line, this week my Digital Media students are presenting a pitch, outlining an idea for a short video which will critically explore some aspect of digital culture loosely based on arguments about either convergence or citizen journalism, so I hope I’ll be able to post a few of the results in a few weeks time.

Until then, I wanted to end this post by pointing to the very cool and very virally popular video Apple Mac Music Video by Dennis Liu.  While not really student work (Lui has just finished formal education, but has been working professionally for a while; read an interview here) this is video is inspirational.  It’s a brilliant reminder that under the hood of an Apple Mac (or even a decent PC) is more than enough power to make some truly inspiring and amazing creative work …

Is there really any better expression of the contradictions and complexities at the heart of contemporary China and it’s centrally-planned capitalist state than the bizzare discovery that a factory of Chinese labourers, no doubt working for very little, were actually making flags in support of a Free Tibet? [Via]

[Photo by rmclic CC BY NC SA]

Looking from certain corners of the internet today you’d be forgiven for thinking that the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV) had caused all other events in the world to pause. There has, simply put, been an avalanche of press for the video game. Apparently it might just clock upwards of $US400 million in it’s opening week (yes, that’s a lot of money). And to keep commentators on violence in the media (and specifically videogames) happy, somebody in London obligingly stabbed someone else in the line to buy one of the first copies of GTA IV. If you prefer something equally silly but a whole lot less violent (except, perhaps, to themselves) someone in the US is trying to set a record for continuous gameplay by enduring more than 25 hours in a row of GTA IV (and, yes, it is of course being streamed live across the net, complete with Twitter updates).

However, one of the more interesting subjects to emerge in the press frenzy surrounding the game’s launch is the revival of the synthespian (or synthetic thespian) debate, which last raged seriously when Gollum and his contemporaries proved CGI folks could give their flesh and blood companions a run for their money. Nowadays, it’s videogame (anti-)heroes getting the limelight. As Asher Moses reports for The Age:

He’s the biggest name in entertainment but you won’t find him striding down the red carpet or cavorting with Hollywood starlets under the watchful eye of the paparazzi. No, Niko Bellic, set to become the most high profile Slav in entertainment since Borat Sagdiyev took the box office by storm 18 months ago. He is among the new breed of entertainment personalities who, rather than being cast, are built from scratch by a team of programmers and graphic designers. He’s the protagonist in Grand Theft Auto IV and, just days after hitting the streets, is already giving flesh-and-blood Hollywood stars a run for their money. Launched around the world at midnight on Monday, Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV) is on track to become the biggest entertainment launch in history. Analysts have predicted the title, which has inspired near-perfect reviews from most gaming magazines, will sell at least 6 million copies in its first week.

Sure, the synthespian issue is wedged amongst hype about sales and violence, but it’s certainly an interesting question: to what extent do gamers ‘inhabit’ the characters they play and to what extent will they idolize these characters (provoking some interesting notions about the changing nature of celebrity culture … do we actually need celebrities to even have a supposedly ‘real’ version to idolize?).

For Australians, one of the other notable features of GTA IV is that, thanks to the fact that we still don’t have an R18+ category for games, our version of GTA IV has been toned down to get rating approval.

Update: Australian Game Pro reports that Australians attempting to import the international version of GTA IV (which doesn’t meet Australia’s MA15+ game rating limit) would be guilty of importing prohibited goods and could be fined up to $110,000!

[Photo by Rappzula CC BY NC SA]

Who: Professor Gerard Goggin , University of New South Wales
Where: Alexander Lecture Theatre, UWA
When: 6pm, Monday, 5 May 2008

The Blurb: From networked computers and Internet platforms such as blogging, YouTube, Second Life, and social software, through mobile phones, digital television and entertainment, digital technologies are at the centre of the dynamics of contemporary culture.

Disability is a pivotal part of this digital life. People with disabilities are playing an important yet under-appreciated role in the user-powered creative innovation coming out of digital cultures. At the same time old problems of accessibility and exclusion remain, while new forms of oppression and stereotyping are emerging.

In this lecture, Professor Goggin will explore this rich theme of disability and digital cultures, with case studies drawn from YouTube, Second Life, and mobile phones. He looks at the pressing concerns of accessibility, investigate what is distinctive about people with disabilities’ use of digital technologies, as well as considering how disability is being represented and constructed in new digital cultures. Finally, he will consider how these developments in disability and digital technology fit into the larger social, cultural and political arrangements of Australian life.

Biographical Note: Gerard Goggin is Professor of Digital Communication, and Deputy Director of the new Centre for Social Research in Journalism and Communication, University of New South Wales. He has had a long time interest in disability, digital technology, and media culture. With Christopher Newell he is author of “Digital Disability” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and many other papers on technology, disability, and society. Christopher and Gerard’s second book “Disability in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid” (University of New South Press, 2005) was awarded the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Arts Non-Fiction prize. Gerard’s other books include “Global Mobile Media” (2009), “Internationalizing Internet Studies” (2008), “Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media” (2008), “Mobile Phone Cultures” (2007), “Cell Phone Culture” (2006), “Virtual Nation: The Internet in Australia” (2004), and “Digital Disability” (2003). Gerard is editor of the journal “Media International Australia”.

This public lecture precedes a one-day Seminar on Driving Change in the Disability Sector, sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Studies, the Western Australia Disability Collective and Equity & Diversity UWA.

Update: For those interested, Goggin’s lecture is now available as either streaming audio or for download here.

I’m very pleased that the ‘Beyond Broadcasting’ issue of Media International Australia is out, not only because it features some excellent articles asking some great questions about the future of television in the era of digital communication, but also because it features an article of mine that I’ve been thinking about on and off for a number of years. My article, ‘Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance‘ has ideas that will already be familiar to readers of this blog (and, indeed, my old blog Ponderance) as the concepts in this paper have slowly built up over time and appeared sporadically in blog form (such as here and here). When I started writing up these fragments into the final paper and posted the abstract in this blog, I was delighted that it provoked a conversation with some of my blog’s readers. A larger number of people seem to have found their way to that post after hitting NBC’s “We’re sorry, but the clip you selected isn’t available from your location” message and punching it into Google, and a few of them offered a comment on this post before heading elsewhere (quite possibly in search of a proxy so they can watch the US-hosted geo-blocked content).

While the article has taken a couple of years to evolve from the initial idea to this published version, the ideas still seem current. Indeed, there was an engaging debate recently in th US between the New York Times Vulture blog (and here, and here) and film and media scholar Michael Newman over the issue of newspapers and blogs posting spoilers about current TV shows when audiences are increasingly time-shifting and either watching their shows a few days later on TiVO, or a few months later on DVD. As I argue in my paper, the problem of avoiding spoilers becomes even harder for viewers in other countries, when the broadcast (or the option to download legally) is often delayed by a number of months – an issue indicative of what I’ve called the tyranny of digital distance.

I’m also pleased that the editors of this themed issue, and the general editor of Media International Australia were kind enough to give me permission to put up a post-print of my article here. (A post-print, for those interested, is the final version of the article submitted to the journal after the peer review process and final changes to the article have been made, but before the article is page-made and the layout done for the journal itself.) So, if you fancy reading the whole paper and you don’t have access to Media International Australia through your library, you can still read the full paper here.

If you can get hold of the journal, there are a number of other papers which are a great read. One of these, Axel Bruns’ ‘Reconfiguring Television for a Networked, Produsage Context’ can be accessed over at his blog.

As always, any comments or thoughts on my paper or the issues it touches on are most welcome!

Have a fabulous festive season, wherever you are in the world!

When I get back to Perth, one of the first things I’m doing is speaking as part of the next Propel Arts Pollinate Forum. It’s a free event for anyone under 25 years of age (but don’t forget to register) and $10 for older folk. Here’s the details:

MYSPACE IS BETTER THAN YOURS – POLLINATE FORUM

MONDAY 27 August

- skills development for ALL young artists -

Our next Pollinate is fast approaching and it asks the question: Is MySpace is better than Yours?

Join Propelarts and a group of young artists, arts workers and young people on Monday 27 August to discuss the digital age and its transformation of the arts space as we know it. Helping us take a look at issues around promoting your arts online will be:

Dr Tama Leaver: Tama is an academic from the University of Western Australia, who’ll be talking about the trends and theories of digital spaces.

Bonnie Davies: Bonnie is more than comfortable with new technologies. She’ll talk about some of the creative possibilities they offer and what she has learnt in working for the media artists of PVI collective.

David Hodgkinson: Our Propelarts treasurer is also a qualified lawyer, and for this Pollinate, he’ll help unravel the legal ramifications of putting your art online.

Lots of interesting discussion and tips and tricks for getting your message out there! Check out Propelarts at www.propelarts.org.au and RSVP to Maeve on 9328 5855 / maeve@propelarts.org.au.

… see you there! …

Where: Minter Ellison, Level 49 Central Park, 152-158 St Georges Terrace, Perth

Date: Monday, 27 August from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm

Topic: MySpace is better than Yours – promoting your arts on the internet

Cost: Free for Propelarts members and all people 25 or under. Otherwise, $10

I hope to see at least a few readers of this blog there!

Yesterday I was interviewed by Laura Miller on RTR FM’s radio programme ‘Morning Magazine’. Laura and I spoke about about MySpace, Facebook, Australian politican’s using social software, and the recent interest in these spaces in terms of ‘class’ on the back of danah boyd’s work. For the two or three people in the world who would be interested in hearing me talk about these things, you can listed to an mp3 recording of the interview (which clocks in at just under 10 minutes) here.

Incidentally, Laura completed her Communication Studies degree at UWA last year and was part of a team who put together the wonderful comic exploration of the role of the Peacock’s at UWA and that video is viewable here (fans of Laura’s may want to focus around 2:18 in, which features a 1970s Laura cameo!).

Chuck tagged me a few days ago with the Eight Things meme; although I’m generally fairly anti-meme, I’ve been enjoying a bit of back and forth with Chuck in his blog and on del.icio.us, so figured I could add one more procrastination on a writing day.  Apparently, I have to start with rules … 

Rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and that they should read your blog.

Eight Facts about Me:

1. When I was in Primary School I won a Lego building competition; this is, without a doubt, my fondest memory of the first 7 years of education.

2. Apart from The Goonies, the film that rattled around my brain the most when I was a kid was called Explorers.  I was fascinated how three boys could essentially make a spacecraft out of everyday junk (and a little piece of alien technology).  In retrospect, this example of making something amazing from the bits and pieces others leave lying around resonates with some of the way I view the internet and participatory culture (and until I looked it up on IMDb to link to for this post, I hadn’t realised River Phoenix was one of the kids).

3. When I was twelve years old I joined Perth’s Doctor Who fan club, The West Lodge, which was my first proper immersion into fandom; I attend the local science-fiction convention in the following year (Swancon 14) but found the whole thing rather intimidating and didn’t get back to Swancon until  seven years later when Neil Gaiman visited Perth as GoH in 1996.

4. I have re-read all six of Frank Herbert’s Dune books as a series at least twenty times since I was 14; I’ve been relatively unimpressed by the prequel novels in the past few years.

5. My sister and I both have PhDs and are the first members of our family to ever attend university at all.  My sister is eighteen months younger, started her thesis a year after I did, but we both were officially given our PhDs at the same graduation ceremony.

6. Emily and I currently live less than 14 metres from Subiaco Oval, which is where Australian Rules Football attracts 40-45,000 people most weekends.  Despite AFL being Australia’s national winter sport, I’ve never been to a Football game.

7. Until last Saturday I had never test-driven a car, having bought my only owned vehicle to date from my parents.  On Saturday I test-drove a Prius which Emily and I are seriously considering buying despite the fact it will take us several years to pay it off.

8. In the proposal for my PhD thesis in 2000, the final chapter was supposed to look at the use of computer-generated imagery and special effects in nature documentaries as a case study of artificial culture where natural and technological meaning merged together.  (It never got written because after that proposal both September 11 2001 and the Spider-Man films happened, and I used the latter to interrogate the cultural impact of the former.)

You’re It! I now tag the following people (hoping at least a few will play along): Jill Walker Rettberg (just getting used to writing that double barrel surname!), Christy Dena, David Silver, Nancy Baym (because fandom has a meme for a heart!), Mia Consalvo (who can sadly not follow the meme and call it ‘cheating‘), Jean Burgess, Kate Raynes-Goldie and Kevin Lim (who lives for these sort of connections!).

On Saturday, Emily and I officially tied the knot!  It was a magical day, with love all around us, complemented by blue skies, a shining sun, and the warmth of some amazing friends and family.  The first few pictures have made their way onto Flickr here if you fancy a glimpse of our wonderful day!

As you might imagine, Emily and I are off to enjoy some quality time together, so I will be completely out of touch – no email, no blogging, no Flickr, no Facebook – until we return on June 25th.  This also means any comments left here that require approval (which all comments from first-time posters do) won’t be confirmed until then either (please don’t be offended by the delay).

In the meantime, have fun, and maybe watch In Media Res around June 18th for something that’ll get your Spider-Senses tingling!

Visitors to this blog may have noticed many things broken or not got anything but a 404 for the last 12 hours. My apologies – most is now fixed, but let me explain. Last night, about 5 minutes before I went to bed, I got this email:

from: “support@secureserver.net” <support@secureserver.net>
subject: Update [Incident ID: 2110748] – Information Regarding Your Account for tamaleaver.net

Support Staff Response

Dear Sir/Madam,
It has come to our attention that your tamaleaver.net hosting account is running a vulnerable version of wordpress. This has caused an attacker to upload malicious content to your hosting account. We have removed the malicious content and have disabled the vulnerable script.
To prevent further attacks, we request that you update your version of wordpress as soon as possible. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.
Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.
Regards,
Advanced Hosting Support

I was a little surprised since I was running 2.1.3 which, to the best of my knowledge, was fine (and I was not running the buggy 2.1.1). However, I figured I’d check in the morning what had been deleted – I presumed a script that wasn’t part of the standard WordPress world, so that was fine. However, to my horror this morning when I checked, I found that “support” (and I use the term very broadly) had done at least two things: deleted my entire wp-admin directory, and deleted a number of image files (the reason for which I can’t even begin to fathom). As a result, this blog has been rather stuffed for the last 12 hours. Since it was broken anyway, I’ve now upgraded to WordPress 2.2 and got almost everything back and running. However, a month’s worth of uploaded images were deleted, and I’ve not backed up since the end of April, so they can’t be recovered (thus, if you find a blog post with an image missing … primarily from posts in May 2007, this is why; I’ll try and replace them at a later stage.)

So, sorry for the downtime, if I had any control over it I’d promise it wouldn’t happen again! That said, the support folk at secureserver (whom GoDaddy use) will be getting a rather frank email about the over-deletion of my files, and, more to the point, a request to exactly what they think happened since I’ve seen no evidence myself of any malicious content.

I was playing with Google Trends and their comparison function and noticed that you can now limit searches to regions (ie just Australia, for example). I was playing around looking at the comparative popularity of ‘blog’ versus ‘wiki’ and found something interesting: cumulatively, global searchers are still typing in ‘blog’ more, but in Australia, ‘wiki’ is a more popular term, and has been since the third quarter of 2006. Since there’s no scale on Google Trends, I’ve no numbers attached to these trends, but the results are interesting nevertheless.

Australia is looking for wikis…

While the world is looking for blogs…

[Click either image to expand.]

I’ve no idea why wikis are more popular in Australia … perhaps something to do with Wikipedia? I note in the News trends (the smaller bottom graph), blogs are still mentioned a lot more in the mainstream media. I wonder what it is about wikis and Aussies?

Slideshare – the YouTube of powerpoint – has been around for a while now, but I’ve always wondered in slides, by themselves, are all that valuable as a teaching and learning tool.  Of course, if I’d been thinking like Steve Jobs’ catchphrase “think different” I’d have soon realised that the best slides online are those which are purpose written for that context. 

Today, browing Slideshare, I came across this breakdown of Pleasantville using slides:

Apparently the author – mcmrbt – uses these slides in teaching high school students.  My first reaction was to think I really wished my high school media classes had been like this!  Secondly, though, I think I’ve now seen how Slideshare can be used well – as an online resource which complements other classroom teaching, not slides which were used in snyc with a face to face presentation.

[Cross-posted from my eLearning blog.]

Last week danah boyd posted a few questions about Twitter use.  Since I answered each one in my head, I figure I’d post my answers here on the (very off) chance someone else is interested in my answers.  danah’s questions are in italics …

First, the practical question. Can i quote you?
[X] Yes, and you *must* use my real name.

1. Why do you use Twitter? What do you like/dislike about it?

I love the immediacy of Twitter.  I also like the fact that since Tweets are so small, people often write more personal things, letting you – over time – build a more holistic sense of them as a person not just as an academic (or whatever role that person has as their more careful public face, the face that is often more carefully maintained through other forms, such as blogging).

I don’t like the fact that, so often, I turn to Twitter only when I’m trying to procrastinate or distract myself from what I should “really” be doing!

2. Who do you think is reading your Tweets? Is this the audience you want? Why/why not? Tell me anything you think of relating to the audience for your Tweets.

I’ve got two discernable groups – firstly, Perth folks who Twitter and who knowingly form a sort of semi-web2.0 ensemble (the same folk you’d see at Perth Blog Meetups); secondly my academic and pseudo-academic ‘friends’ (and I use the quote marks since I’ve not physically met a number of the people I’d imagine in this category) who I share some interests with – be it digital culture, film, participatory culture or some combination thereof.  These are both the people I imagine are reading me (or have subscribed to my Tweets) and also the people I read.

3. How do you read others’ Tweets? Do you read all of them? Who do you read/not read and why? Do you know them all?

As at 2.  The only time I read new Tweets, now, is when someone I’m already reading either points to someone/something interesting or is engaged in one side of an interesting conversation and I want to hear the other half!

4. What content do you think is appropriate for a Tweet? What is inappropriate? Have you ever found yourself wanting to Tweet and then deciding against it? Why?

Inappropriate is a hard call – I’ve seen all sorts of colourful language and that seems in keeping with the immediacy and personal aspects of Twitter, but at the same time I wonder if those, aggregated, would be the sort of thing people want to be a reflection of themselves.  I guess links to porn or other potentially offensive material has to be flagged as such – the use of TinyURLs means you’re less able to predict the contents of a link by it’s URL and so the onus (I think) is on the Twitterer to make it clear what they’ve linking to.

5. Are your Tweets public? Why/why not? How do you feel about people you don’t know coming across them? What about people you do know?

Mine are at present.  I’m considering making them private as I’ve caught myself (only once so far) writing and then deleting a Tweet since it was venting about the workplace and the workplace could – at some distant point in the future – notice.  That said, I’m never really sure how private ‘private’ turns out to be.

6. What do i need to know about why Twitter is/is not working for you or your friends?

Twitter, to me, works best in tandem with other forms.  Most of the Twitterers and Twitterati I read are already bloggers, but their Tweets add a level of personality and personal depth which often isn’t visible in their blog posts (which are often more careful, especially because blogs and ‘personal profiles’ so often are synonymous in academia).

I tried Jaiku today since it’s been discussed a lot recently as the ‘other’ Twitter (even though Jaiku was around first, I think).

First impressions of Jaiku – a lot more tools, more fleshed out, I like the idea of comment threads on individual messages, it’s less about popularity per se, and more about a small tight-knit group (I think). The recent explosion of interest and use of Twitter seems to have people trying Jaiku as well, but from my few hours of use, the massive influx of users has left Jaiku with more speed problems than Twitter’s recent scaling and capacity issues.

However, the appeal of Twitter for me is its simplicity … it has very few tools and the posts (Twits) are primarily self-contained. The ‘@’ reponding has evolved socially, but I don’t imagine it’ll grow to get all that complicated.

More to the point, for me, Twitter is a sometimes food and I like my procrastination (or ‘continual partial prescence’ if you must) simple and no fuss.

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).

Given the all the recent furor over misogyny, bullying and the challenges that may (or may not) pose to free speech online, it was pretty amazing to see Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke meeting up for the first time face to face as part of a CNN news story. (if you’ve managed to miss it all, see Kathy’s post and Locke’s initial response before reading on). While the CNN story itself was in no danger of having too much depth, it did provoke Sierra and Locke to post what they call ‘coordinated statements on recent events’ in which they agree that misogyny, abuse and threats are bad and that restricting free speech through legislation is not the answer.

From Kathy Sierra:

Chris and I are in complete agreement that it would be tragic if this incident were used as a weapon by those who would limit free and open exchange. My desire is for much more open debate on this issue, not legislated limits. The overwhelming, incredible support so many have given to this issue makes me very hopeful, and the positive result of all this has been the conversation that’s taking place right now, between so many people. This could be a very important moment if we stop, think, and talk about the kind of future we really want online, and make certain we don’t give up something more important in the process.

From Chris Locke:

There is time yet for more balanced articles to be written, less heated conversations to take place. Misogyny is real — and vile. Violence against women is wrong. It must not be tolerated. This issue should be explored and discussed, not swept under the rug, not rationalized away. At the same time, we need to look closely and carefully at the implications for free speech. The First Amendment allows and protects language that many find noxious. But there are forces in the world at present — not least in the US — that would leap at any opportunity to limit speech or even abolish certain forms of it. Crucial as is the current debate about hate speech directed at women, it would be tragic if this incident were used as a weapon by those who would limit free and open exchange.

I’m heartened by these statements and think that both Sierra and Locke have made real headway in ensuring that all of this discussion is led in a way that it can be productive, not just reactive.

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.

In light of the recent tragic chatroom/webcam suicide, I wondered what an article “Ghosts of blogging haunt net cemetery” might have to say about the role of blogs after a blogger’s life. Alas, this has to be one of the worst, ignorant, mainstream-media puff pieces in a long time:

In the latest entry on her personal weblog, Lindsay Lohan, the hard-partying Hollywood actress, was in characteristically bubbly form. “Hey guys, I’m soooo sooo sorry I haven’t written in a while!!” she wrote. She was heading off to New York for two days of photo-shoots, then to Toronto in Canada for a week of filming, then back to Los Angeles again. The entry ended: “I just wanted to check in, I’ll try and write more … xx LL.” It has been a long wait for any Lohan fans who may be hoping for an update. That entry was posted on October 15, 2003.

Lohan’s blog has since taken its place in the internet’s fastest-growing graveyard – of an estimated 200 million blogs that have been started, then abandoned.

The extraordinary failure rate of online diaries and claims that interest in blogging will soon begin a precipitous slide are sparking an intriguing debate about the future of self-expression on the internet and whether blogs, once seen as revolutionary, are destined to become a footnote in the history of computing.

To the embarrassment of millions of internet users – from Hollywood celebrities such as Lohan, Melanie Griffith and Barbra Streisand to countless ordinary parents, workers and would-be poets – the evidence of failed diary-keeping cannot be easily erased from search engines that continue to provide links to blogs that have lain dormant for years.

This article clearly commits many of the most juvenile mistakes about writing regarding blogs — no, not all blogs are online diaries; no, celebrities who blog are no more typical of bloggers than they are of people — but even a journalist who has never read a blog should feel a little silly making the leap to describing the ‘extraordinary failure rate’ of blogs. Or are blogs, unlike regular diaries, or pretty much any other form of narrative or writing – the only form which is supposed to be endless? Blogs have been around for a long time and, like most other things, many blogs have had their natural lifespan, dictated by the purpose for which they were originally constructed. Some blogs are used in education – and thus often have a lifespan of a semester or two; some are issue-driven and may end when that issue is resolved; indeed some are diaries, but like hardcopy diaries, they tend to get left behind after a few years.

All of those gripes aside, the article did make two good points: firstly, that the exponential rise of blogging has to slow soon (because exponential means, quite literally, that there would have to be more blogs than people within a few years at recent growth rates); and secondly that citizens of a digital culture may be shifting their focus to other platforms like YouTube and MySpace. That’s not really an argument about the death of blogging, though – it’s more testimony to the maturing of the world of social software in that many more options available for those many networks of interest and friendship which life online can facilitate.

Of course, I wonder why no one writes about how many MySpace profiles are abandoned? (Far be it from me to points out that the same folk that own MySpace own The Australian).

I guess one has to ask The Australian, if blogs are on the decline, why does your blog section keep growing?

“It’s a hell of a time for him to go. We really need him now.”

- Joe Simon (co-creator of Captain America)

While Peter Parker and his alter-ego Spider-Man have long been the iconic representation of the layperson (or everyperson) — the ordinary guy who, by accident rather than intent, became a hero — Captain America, in contrast, has always been stood for the ideals of the American dream and the democratic system at its heart. Captain America was created in the midst of World War II, and has fought the Nazis, communism and many other threats to the ‘American way of life’. Given his role, the demise of such a figure is more than a ploy to sell comic books (although it is that, too); it’s a commentary on the upheaval at the heart of what being American actually means. As Joe Simon, Cap’s co-creator along with Jack Kirby, has stated in interviews on the back of Cap’s death: “It’s a hell of a time for him to go. We really need him now.”

In July last year I wrote about the parallels between Marvel’s Civil War storyline and the ‘War of Terror’, noting that the Civil War stories borrowed heavily both from September 11 and the related special-edition tributes done by various comic book publishers. The image of Captain America’s sorrow was used powerfully both in Marvel’s renderings of the ruins of the World Trade Centre Towers and the tragedy which kick-started Marvel’s Civil War. During the past months, I was also impressed by the directness with which the Civil War stories appeared to address the situation in Guantanamo Bay when one of Marvel’s more jovial characters, Speedball – or Robert Baldwin – was arrested as an “an unregistered combatant” and locked away in a prison which seemed to exist outside of legal jurisdiction. To some extent that critique continues beyond the conclusion of the Civil War storyline as Robert Baldwin has now backed down and accepted Registration and become a new ‘hero’ (in the broadest sense of the word) under the guise ‘Penance’, a self-hating hero, wracked by guilt about the deaths his team unwittingly caused, and whose powers emerge proportionally to the amount of pain he’s in (it’s hardly a shock, then, that Warren Ellis is penning Thunderbolts, which now features Penance in the team’s line-up).

[Image from Marvel's Civil War: Frontline #10; click to enlarge.]

After those impressive beginnings, I was completely stunned at how badly the Marvel wrapped up its Civil War run, with Cap seemingly surrendering on a revelation — that the war between heroes was hurting a lot of innocent people in its wake — so mundane it bordered on stupid. That said, when Cap was actually gunned down by an assassin in Captain America #25, I could see where the story was supposed to have gone (I still think, though, that his death should have occurred in the last issue of the Civil War story, not another tie-in edition, even Cap’s own book). Cap’s death has altered the Marvel Universe, with even Tony Stark (Iron Man) privately admitting that the Civil War wasn’t worth the death of one of Marvel’s greatest icons (in Civil War: The Confession, yet another Civil war spin-off). There has been a lot of press about Marvel killing off one its core characters, but I think these stories are best summed up by Damian Fowler writing in The Guardian‘s books blogs with these insightful thoughts on ‘Why Captain America had to die’:

Created by Marvel comics in 1941 to battle the Nazis, the massively-pumped “Cap” was first seen punching Hitler in the face. Nice work if you can get it. But last week the patriotic crusader was shot and killed by a sniper in the latest issue of the long-running comic book.

Over the years, Captain America’s storyline has always reflected American moods and attitudes. When he first showed up, he was a sentinel of liberty and the fight for right. He was a mirror of everything that America stood for during the second world war. He always fought relentlessly for values that the US held dear.

How times change. Now he’s very much dead, something that was confirmed by the president and publisher of Marvel Entertainment. The New York Times all but wrote an obituary for the man, albeit in the arts pages, dead at 66. But it’s a sign of the times.

His demise is so much more than a tragedy in Toontown, even as the comic-book geeks mourn his passing. [...] Cap’s death is being seen, analysed and discussed through the prism of national politics as a damning indictment of George Bush’s America. Even the major American TV networks picked up on the story, cutting images of the war in Iraq with the comic book images.

The Marvel Universe post-Captain America is an unfamiliar place. It’s a Marvel Universe in tune with the US and the Western world more broadly; a West which invaded Iraq four years ago but has to bring any semblance of stability to the region. With Cap’s shield gathering dust, his ideological opposite, Iron Man (a weapons manufacturer and alcoholic as well as a superhero) is now in charge of Marvel’s registered super-hero fighting machine (with a team in every state of the US). Spider-man, who revealed his identity during the Civil War, is now part of a small but notable underground resistance, but is also desperately trying to deal with the death of family members. Captain America’s death hangs over the comic book world, and leaves lasting questions about the direction and politics of the world of Marvel and its heroes.

However, As Benari Poulten reminds us, Captain America has been dead before and Steve Rogers has been replaced as Cap in the past, so it’s unlikely that the iconic hero will be gone from the Marvel universe for good. That said, Marvel have enjoyed amazing press and attention in the wake of the assassination of one of their key heroes — Cap’s demise even made ‘the Word’ on The Colbert Report and Steven Colbert now has Cap’s shield in his trophy case — so if death is to carry any weight at all in mainstream comic books, the inevitable return will have to be handled carefully, not just commercially. Personally, I think Steve Rogers should stay dead now, I think his death was representative of many things, including changes in Marvel both as a comic book universe and as part of a multi-national company. That said, words by Peter David about the X-Men titles are increasingly true about all comic book characters: “Mutant heaven has no pearly gates, only revolving doors” (X-Factor #70). If he can’t stay dead, Marvel, please earn any return of Captain America or one of your most striking characters will be diluted beyond a meaningful existence.

(Yes, the title of this post is a shameless adaptation of the Cap cartoon theme song; it’s also an homage to Henry Jenkins’ brilliant essay ‘Captain America Sheds His Might Tears: Comics and September 11′ which appeared in Daniel J. Sherman and Terry Nardin (eds), Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11, Indiana UP, 2006.)

Apparently small is the new black. This month’s Wired Magazine contains a Minifesto, celebrating the coolness of all things mini, from meals to media:

Today, media snacking is a way of life. In the morning, we check news and tap out emails on our laptops. At work, we graze all day on videos and blogs. Back home, the giant HDTV is for 10-course feasting – say, an entire season of 24. In between are the morsels that fill those whenever minutes, as your mobile phone carrier calls them: a 30-second game on your Nintendo DS, a 60-second webisode on your cell, a three-minute podcast on your MP3 player.

From YouTube’s clip culture to Apple’s iTunes (not iAlbums), it seems for the time being smaller is, in fact, better! In the world of social software, the coolest and probably the smallest is Twitter, which allows users to post entries of no more than 140 characters, sent in from the web, IM or text message and being sent out via these same three platforms to your Twitter friends. Twitter has some impressive parents, including Evan Williams (who started Blogger before is was sold to Google) and the other Obvious folk. I’ve experimented with Twitter for the past few days, and I can see the appeal of its immediacy, and the fact that you really can’t take up much time with so little space to type! From the larger blogosphere, Jill Walker has been thinking about her Twittering in terms of blogging, noting similarities and differences:

…there’s something very satisfying about logging your days like that and seeing what others are up to. It’s a blog at a different scale than this one, in a way, very short posts, but far more frequent…

The logging aspect is quite addictive, and despite the brevity of posts, reading just a few Twitters seems to build quite an intimate picture of someone. Ross Mayfield in his post ‘Twitter Tips the Tuna’ gives this succinct explanation of Twitter:

Twitter, in a nutshell, is mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network. You can use it with SMS (sending a message to 40404), on the web or IM. A darn easy API has enabled other clients such as Twitterific for the Mac. Twitter is Continuous Partial Presence, mostly made up of mundane messages in answer to the question, “what are you doing?” A never-ending steam of presence messages prompts you to update your own. Messages are more ephemeral than IM presence — and posting is of a lower threshold, both because of ease and accessibility, and the informality of the medium.

I think that notion of ‘Continuous Partial Presence’ may very well be the core of Twitter. Mayfield goes on to argue that Twitter is peaking, with the uptake rate getting higher and higher, with everyone from Joi Ito to the BBC staking their claim as Twitterati. Indeed, as Steve Rubel notes, even John Edwards who is once again campaigning to be the Democrat candidate in the US presidential elections, is using Twitter to keep in touch with his supporters.

While there are probably a lot of people who’ll see Twitter as the icon of procrastination (and I can see their point!), Liz Lawley responds to criticisms of Twitter, pointing out that these ephemeral tidbits can actually be quite important:

The first criticizes the triviality of the content. But asking “who really cares about that kind of mindless trivia about your day” misses the whole point of presence. This isn’t about conveying complex theory–it’s about letting the people in your distributed network of family and friends have some sense of where you are and what you’re doing. And we crave this, I think. When I travel, the first thing I ask the kids on the phone when I call home is “what are you doing?” Not because I really care that much about the show on TV, or the homework they’re working on, but because I care about the rhythms and activities of their days. No, most people don’t care that I’m sitting in the airport at DCA, or watching a TV show with my husband. But the people who miss being able to share in day-to-day activity with me–family and close friends–do care.

The second type of criticism is that the last thing we need is more interruptions in our already discontinuous and partially attentive connected worlds. What’s interesting to me about Twitter, though, is that it actually reduces my craving to surf the web, ping people via IM, and cruise Facebook. I can keep a Twitter IM window open in the background, and check it occasionally just to see what people are up to. There’s no obligation to respond, which I typically feel when updates come from individuals via IM or email. Or I can just check my text messages or the web site when I feel like getting a big picture of what my friends are up to.

So, for Lawley, it would appear that everyone has their own Twitterati who are more likely to be family and friends than anyone else. Thanks once again to Steve Rubel, there’s now a basic Twitter Search, so if you’re not using it already, why not explore a little and decide who might be in your Twitterati? (And feel free to add me, if you like.)

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.