Annotated Digital Culture Links: February 8th 2009
Links for February 5th 2009 through February 8th 2009:
- Journalism Education’s Future: Broader, Deeper in Community [Center for Citizen Media] – Dan Gillmor, on the challenge for journalism educators in the C21st: “Journalism educators should be in the vanguard of an absolutely essential shift for society at large: helping our students, and people in our larger communities, to navigate and manage the myriad information streams of a media-saturated world.We need to help them understand why they need to become activists as consumers — by taking more responsibility for the quality of what they consume, in large part by becoming more critical thinkers. And they need to understand their emerging role as creators of media.
In both cases, as consumers and creators, we start with principles.
For media consumers:
• Be Skeptical
• Exercise Judgement
• Open Your Mind
• Keep Asking Questions
• Learn Media TechniquesFor media creators (after incorporating the above):
• Be Thorough
• Get it Right
• Insist on Fairness
• Think Independently
• Be Transparent, Demand Transparency” - Stimulus package Facebook activism [Larvatus Prodeo] – “Thanks to commenter Bird of paradox on a previous thread for drawing my attention to the creation of a Facebook group “Come on Turnbull, don’t take away my $950 bucks !”. As of this morning, it was the largest political Facebook group in Australia with 5000 members and a goal of 8000 by 9pm tonight. They’ll easily reach that. When I checked in five minutes ago, there were 7887 members. Another 60 have joined now. The group creator describes his motivation this way: ‘We are sending a clear message that Australians need this boost. As a uni student I need help to buy my text books, my mother is a single parent who needs help and my brother is heading into year 12 and he needs it… Think about how much difference this bonus will make to you and your families…’ The group page also provides information on how to lobby Senators. Very interesting indeed.” (Checking today there were more than 34,000 members!)
- Australians desert MySpace for Facebook [The Age] – “Facebook celebrates its fifth birthday this week and the company has much to crow about, as new figures reveal the social network has twice as many monthly users in Australia as its nearest competitor, MySpace. According to web traffic monitor Nielsen Online, Facebook attracted 4,682,000 unique visitors in December, compared with just 2,362,000 for MySpace. Furthermore, each Facebook user viewed 381 pages on Facebook but MySpace users looked at only 252 pages.
The figures show Australians appear to be deserting MySpace for Facebook … In Britain, the BBC reports, Facebook has 17 million users or three times as many as MySpace. Globally, ComScore released figures late last month showing 222 million people visited Facebook in December, versus 125 million for MySpace.”
Annotated Digital Culture Links: February 4th 2009
Links for February 2nd 2009 through February 4th 2009:
- How Natalie became Australia’s queen of YouTube [The Age] – “From her parents’ home in western Sydney, Natalie Tran, Australia’s queen of YouTube, has proven time and again that titillation is not a prerequisite to internet fame. With more than 150,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, Tran, 22, is easily the most subscribed YouTube user in Australia, while globally she ranks 37th. The 118 videos she’s created over two years have amassed 64 million views, making her also the most viewed Australian YouTube user of all time – more popular on the site than even AC/DC, whose videos have attracted 53 million views. But while some female web stars such as Obama Girl have used their sexuality to amass scores of drooling fanboys, Tran has eschewed titillation in favour of comedic skits about her everyday life.” (She’s very funny and has impressive production values for this sort of talking-from-my-bedroom cam style.)
- MySpace purges 90,000 sex offenders [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “MySpace has identified and barred some 90,000 registered sex offenders from using the site over the last two years, the online networking site revealed to a US investigative task force on Tuesday. The “shocking” number was 40,000 more than MySpace had previously acknowledged, according to Connecticut Attorney-General Richard Blumenthal, a co-chairman of the task force of state attorneys-general looking into sex offenders’ use of social networking. MySpace disclosed the figures to the task force in response to a subpoena. “This shocking revelation, resulting from our subpoena, provides compelling proof that social networking sites remain rife with sexual predators,” Mr Blumenthal said in a statement.” (Blumenthal sees this figure as evidence that MySpace should only allow “real” identities and use age-verification; I see this as evidence that we should be educating young people from an early age about how to deal with unwanted attention, predators and so forth, whatever the medium!)
- Virtual gold broker “sells” for $10 million [Boing Boing] – Cory Doctorow: “My MMO Inc., has purchased MyMMOShop.com for $10,000,000 — MyMMOShop being a company that buys and sells virtual gold, prestige items, and other virtual wealth. My MMO is a privately held company, so it’s impossible to say whether 10 million actual dollars left one bank account and entered another (as opposed to a stock swap or other “sale”), but this is still pretty whacky news. I’m working on a novel about gold farming and I spent most of the last year talking to farmers, brokers, players, academics, game-runners, moderators and others who follow the field, and I’ve concluded that it’s possibly the weirdest grey market in the world.”
Talking about Facebook & Privacy with RTR FM
I was interviewed this morning on Perth’s RTR FM about privacy concerns raised in light of media reports that Facebook plans “to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150 million members by creating one of the world’s largest market research databases.” While the reports themselves might have overstated the case in this instance, I’m constantly surprised by how little thought most users of social networking sites give to their own privacy; I’m equally dismayed when it comes as a revelation to people that Facebook is actually about trying to make money – it’s a business, not philanthropy! That said, any chance to get people thinking a bit more about the digital footprints they leave is a good thing and I enjoyed the this morning’s chat on the air. If you want you can access ‘Facebook is evil now?’ on RTR’s website, on click here for an mp3 of the interview (10 minutes, around 9Mb).
A New Position & New Beginnings …
So, I’m a bit behind on announcing my new position, but for those who don’t already know, I’ve accepted a lectureship in the Internet Studies department at Curtin University of Technology. The move was motivated by a couple of things, but one the main factors, to be honest, was job security; with an almost-four-month old at home, escaping from rolling one-year contracts suddenly seemed very important! That said, Internet Studies has a lot to offer: I’m working with some fantastic colleagues, am teaching in areas closer to my own research interests than ever before, and this year Curtin is in the midst of reworking its curriculum for a new course structure in 2010 which means I’ll get lots of opportunities to redesign existing offerings and plan out a new stream around the notion of digital presence! I’m pleased that my broader interests in digital culture, as are often evident in this blog, will be at the fore of my teaching now rather than a just a fragment as has been the case in past years.
Leaving UWA has been an odd experience, almost like leaving home, in a way. I started out there as a very unsure undergraduate in 1995 majoring in History; along the way my interest shifted to popular culture and media studies and, after a fairly abrupt track change, I ended up with my BA(Hons) in English, Communication and Cultural Studies. Not content with five years tertiary study, I continued straight into a doctoral programme which eventually led to a PhD looking at what I termed Artificial Culture. Along the way I tutored, guest lectured and had the privilege of writing and running several units in English and Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies and the newly independent Communication Studies. In 2006, with PhD in hand, I accepted a position at UWA as a Higher Education developer in 2006 and 2007 and while I enjoyed teaching postgraduates and new academic staff about tertiary teaching, I was definitely happiest last year when I returned to Communication Studies and had the pleasure of teaching an outstanding cohort of undergraduates from first-years to honours students. From the Student News Projects and Digital Media Projects in Comm2203, to the Remix Video Projects by the students in my iGeneration honours unit, I was consistently impressed by what tomorrow’s media creators were achieving as students today! My colleagues in Communication Studies were all fantastic, too, and I’m looking forward to knowing them primarily as friends in the coming years.
This coming semester I’m looking forward getting to know my new colleagues in Internet Studies better, and to being impressed by my Curtin students. It’ll be a different style of teaching, as Internet Studies offers on-campus, external and Open University versions of most units, so there will be a lot more online teaching which will hold new challenges, but no doubt new exciting opportunities, too. In the coming months I’m teaching one unit on Virtual Communities and another called Network Culture and the Virtual Society, so I should be right at home there. Learning a new university, new systems, new rules and new procedures will take a while, especially when the UWA systems really are like second nature to me by now, but it’s a new beginning for me and I’m looking forward to making the most of Internet Studies both in teaching terms and to kick-start a few of the more web-based research projects I’ve been planning. More details on those as they start to reach a more robust form …
(Oh, and the reason blogging has slowed isn’t just due to the move to a new university; my home computer has been running slower and slower under Windows Vista for the past few months until it became unmanageable about a week ago … I’m now in the process of transferring to a new OS, but it’s a gradual process so I’m using an older laptop at home which, being generous, is good for email and word processing at most. Blogging shall resume in full in the coming weeks!)
Annotated Digital Culture Links: February 2nd 2009
Links for February 2nd 2009:
- Researcher: No Link Between Violent Games & School Shootings [GamePolitics] – “A researcher at Texas A&M International University has concluded that there is “no significant relationship” between school shootings and playing violent video games. Writing for the Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, Prof. Christopher Ferguson criticizes the methodology used in earlier research linking games to violence and aggression. He also points out that no evidence of violent game play was found in recent high-profile incidents such as the Virginia Tech massacre, the Utah Trolley Stop mall shooting and the February, 2008 shooting on the campus of Northern Illinois University.”
- Internet users worldwide surpass 1 billion | Digital Media [CNET News] – “Global Internet usage reached more than 1 billion unique visitors in December, with 41.3 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a report released Friday by ComScore. The study looked at Internet users over the age of 15 who accessed the Net from their home or work computers. Europe grabbed the next largest slice of the global Internet audience, with 28 percent, followed by the United States, with an 18.4 percent slice. But Latin America, while comprising just 7.4 percent of the global Internet audience, is the region to watch, noted Jamie Gavin, a ComScore senior analyst. “
- YouTube – 2009 Oscars Interactive Photo Hunt! – “A new genre? YouTube user Copyrighthater has created a game using YouTube’s in-video links and annotation tools. In each video (a.k.a. game level) you’re presented with two images from an Oscar movie and you have to find the difference and click it. If you’re right, you get to the next level.” (Thanks, Jill!)
- The Pope on YouTube [Official Google Blog] – “Today we’re delighted to announce that the Vatican has launched a dedicated YouTube channel. To find out more about why the Pope has taken the decision to interact with YouTube on a regular basis, here is a short introduction from Father Federico Lombardi, S.I., Director of Vatican Radio, the Vatican Television Centre and the Holy See Press Office.”
- Video games thrash movies and DVDs [WA Today] – “The video games industry is now double the size of the box office and more than 40 per cent larger than the movie disc industry in Australia, thanks to explosive growth in social games that allow the whole family to play. The Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia (IEAA) today released figures showing games industry revenue was $1.96 billion in calendar year 2008, an increase of 47 per cent from the previous year. Box office takings for the same period were up 6 per cent to $946 million, the Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia said. Total revenue for movies sold on disc grew 5 per cent to $1.4 billion, the Australian Visual Software Distributors Association (AVSDA) said.”
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