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Beyond Broadcasting: ‘Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance’
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!
Merry Christmas
Have a fabulous festive season, wherever you are in the world!
Propel Arts – Pollinate Forum – ‘MySpace is better than Yours’ – Monday, August 27th
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! 🙂
Talking Facebook, MySpace, Australian Politics and Class … on the radio
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!).
Eight Things About Me (A Meme)
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!).
Married!
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!
Upgrades, Deletions, Apologies … and a Little Anger
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.netSupport 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.
Searching Blogs Vs Wikis – Australians Prefer Wiki (The World Prefers Blog)
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?
The Value of Slideshare
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.]
Six Twitter Questions
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).
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