jill/txt

Forrester Research have just released (expensive) reports on how many people in the US and in some European and Asian countries are using social media. Forrester has their own classification of different kinds of users - “creators” actually upload their own content, “critics” rate or review other peoples’ content or contribute to wikis and discussion forums (which could be said to be creating, really), “collectors” tag content and use RSS, “joiners” are active on social network sites, “spectators” read, listen and watch user-generated content, and then there are the “inactive”, who, well, aren’t using social media at all. Their overall conclusions are that there are less and less “inactives” - but also that Europeans are adopting social media at a far slower rate than Americans. This widget’s kind of fun to play with to see the differences:

Why do you think Europeans are so much slower? Americans had a head start on access to technology, but surely that’s evening out by now? I actually think a major reason is Europe’s language barriers, that effectively slice Europe up into many very small media ecologies. With only 4.5 million people speaking Norwegian, the tipping point is hard to reach in Norwegian social media - although more and more people are certainly using social media here in Norway. We have very little or no contact with other European countries’ social media - barely even with Sweden and Denmark.

Another possibility is that Viviane Serfaty was right, and that blogging is a peculiarly American form, akin to the diary-writing of the Puritans. For the Puritans, Serfaty wrote, working through your everyday and religious doubts, feelings and choices by writing about them in a diary was an ethical necessity and very spiritual work. In Scandinavian Lutheran societies, on the other hand, the population was taught to read the bible but writing was seen as unnecessary for peasants. Further south, European Catholics had a more direct relationship with God, in spoken prayer and hail maries and penances. I don’t know enough about religion to know whether this is a completely tenable theory (I mused about it here, though, on page 7), but it’s an interesting thought. Serfaty was writing about blogging in particular, but perhaps one could look at all social media as similarly confessional and personal and so such cultural differences might continue to hold true?

For today’s class students have made the first drafts of their video “trailers” and have an idea what they want their projects to be about. We’re going to look at the videos, and discuss ideas. We’ll also begin putting ideas together - I’ve set up a shared site (a wiki with simpler editing) in Wetpaint so we can all easily add text. So far Wetpaint seems kind of slow and full of ads but if we like using it I’ll upgrade to get rid of the ads. When we can see everyone’s ideas it will be easier to see where the gaps are and what other kinds of research we need to think about. I know some people are still struggling to figure out what they want to do, so this should be helpful for them too!

As a reminder, here’s our stuff:

• Our Netvibes page with the latest blog posts (and videos) and links to Diigo
• The syllabus and schedule
• Our Wetpaint site with collated project ideas
• Tasks due in the next few weeks
• Form for entering info about five research articles each

A Netvibes page for our Remix Culture course is in progress - obviously there aren’t many blog posts or Diigo links yet, but these things will feed in as we go. There’s a “wall” thing where you can leave comments - feel free to leave suggestions for us there!

In today’s class we’re going to do this:

• I’ll give a tour of how to use Diigo, and show how the Netvibes page works
• We’ll look at examples of remixes students have brought to class
• We’ll brainstorm ideas for projects: what are students interested in?
• I’ll demonstrate how the database for gathering research and other articles works. Here’s the form where you enter data, and here’s the spreadsheet that generates.
• We’ll talk about the schedule ahead and tasks that’ll be due in the next few weeks - we’re going to the library on Tuesday, to get ready for gathering our sources, and we’ll be starting work on our videos as well.

I’m using Google Docs for the database. It’s really easy to create a form that feeds data into a spreadsheet - I’m not sure how to make the data in the spreadsheet more easily readable though - if you know, please tell me! Here’s the form (I like that you can even embed it in a blog!)

This way of collaboratively creating a reading list is lifted from Mike Wesch, of course, although he made the database in Zoho Creator (which I didn’t like when I tried it) and a member of the research team somehow generated a slick presentation of it.

I really hope it all works out and that students are completely overloaded by all this stuff at the start of the semester. I’ve actually given them nearly twice as much time as Mike Wesch gave his students, and I’ve estimated time use so there shouldn’t be more than the 17 hours a week they’re supposed to be spending on the course - and it will be so awesome to have a good solid grounding for the rest of the course!

Update after class: Spent 40 minutes on Diigo! I think we needed it, but it meant we had too little time for examples and brainstorming. Examples shown included a very long collaborative image, a remixed interview that went viral and spawned other remixes, I like turtles, a Markov chain text remix, and a remix of Clinton’s “I never had sex with that woman” that Sissel had made for a drama group performance.

This semester I’m teaching a new course I’m really excited about, on Remix Culture (DIKULT204 or DIKULT303).

The course is organised as a research group rather than as traditional teacher-led lectures or seminars, and the students and I will work together to gather scholarship about remixing, mashups and appropriation in art and culture and examples of remixes and mashups. The end result of the course for each student (and what gets graded) is a 15 page research paper on a topic within this area, and a 2-4 minute YouTube video presenting the research to a general audience. Additionally, we’ll be putting together a collaborative report. Here’s the current version of the syllabus, which is constantly being tweaked.

If you’ve read about any of Mike Wesch’s courses or heard him speaking you’ll recognise that I’m heavily inspired by his work. Here’s an explanation of how his Digital Ethnography classes work, and here’s an example of a final video that s made for that class - their theme was anonymity, and Katie’s video on PostSecret.com ended up going viral and getting 156,000 views on YouTube - that’s a lot more readers/viewers than most student projects ever get!

For students it’s very useful (and encouraging!) to be able to read Katie’s blog, and see some of the previous drafts and ways in which she thought about what she wanted to do - or you can see the trailer she created at the start of the semester and notice how much more developed the final version is - naturally. This excellent final video wasn’t pulled magically out of a hat - a lot of slow and careful work went into it, and a lot of trial and error.

The first class (which is Tuesday at noon) we’ll focus on getting to know each other and we’ll talk about what we’re going to be doing this semester, of course. I’m expecting most of the students have not been required to make a YouTube video to convey their research before, so looking at examples of what these might look like seems sensible. We’ll also look at examples of remixes. If you’re coming to class, you may want to not watch these in advance! I’m thinking of showing some visual examples, like the many variants of the Mona Lisa and the recent photoshopped Obama as the Joker images (with many variants) that Whitney Phillips wrote about recently. Then some videos - certainly I’ll show Bush and Blair’s love song, and the Vote Different video (which plays on Apple’s 1984 ad) and I think the Edward/Buffy video as well. We should do some music and literature as well - I think I’ll just load up Spotify and oh, there are thousands of examples, but just at random, let’s play the first bars of Queen/David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” followed by Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby”, and maybe Prokoviev’s “Romance” from the Lieutenant Kije suite (starting at 10 seconds in) followed by Sting’s “Russians” (at 1:24). I should have a really old example… (check out this wikipedia entry)

Literature has remixes too - William Burrough’s cutups, of course, or Tom Phillip’s Humument, a “treated” Victorian novel. There’s works like Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Brian Chapman… ’s Impermanence Agent that take text from the websites you’re surfing; there are simple juxtapositions of existing texts as in Two Origins by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and there are writers who ask readers to remix their work, as with Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War. Writers may copy code and structure rather than the exact phrases, as with Vadin Epstein’s version of “My Boyfriend”, or in Scott Rettberg’s Tokyo Garage, which uses code from Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge. And of course literature is saturated with reinterpretations and appropriations of more traditional kinds - Romeo and Juliet to West Side Story, for instance, or Shakespeare’s own borrowing of stories. Games can be remixed with mods that actually rewrite or modify the game itself (Quake is a great example, with lots of mods) or in machinimas, videos made by “taping” actions in the game. Have I forgotten any artforms? I think all have examples of remixes, anyway.

The examples I’m showing span across art, political commentary, fan fiction/expression and references that carry some kind of cultural meaning often not expressed explicitly (”intertextuality”). Edward/Buffy is actually probably more political/ideological commentary than fan fiction, so I guess I’d better also show a “purer” fan remix from Pirates of the Caribbean as well.

Homework for Thursday will be to set up blogs (whereever they like, Blogger or Wordpress are fine) and Diigo accounts so I can add them to our class Netvibes page, and to find at least one example of a remix to show the rest of the research group on Thursday. By the end of the week we’ll all need to be learning to use the video editing software so we can get to work making trailers!

I’m home again after BlogHer, but we’re moving on Monday and so the next days will be filled with boxes - I have a post I want to write about BlogHer but it will have to wait. Just so I don’t completely forget, though, there are a number of interesting comments on the conference out there. Ellen Gerstein wrote an interesting post criticising BlogHer Business. She has many of the same complaints as I had: not enough time, little opportunity for networking, too much speakertime to sponsors; but also has the advantage that she was at last year’s BlogHer Business, which she loved, and so she can compare.

At BlogHer itself, there was criticism of the way it (to some?) seemed to be primarily a mommyblogging conference, of how the free swag (possibly) dominated much of the conference, and the heavy sponsor visibility, even in panel sessions. Also some of the parties organised by sponsors rather than BlogHer itself had issues - like refusing to let babies attend when they’d invited mommybloggers to a party (that’s an interesting little case study in promo to bloggers gone wrong right there) or promising people freebies (like free $100 video cameras) that then ran out before the people who’d been promised them got theirs. The people who run the conference have written a blog post about a lot of the criticism asking for feedback and ideas for next time, and and there are already lots and lots of comments from participants.

While I didn’t much enjoy the first day, I had a lot of interesting conversations on the second day of the conference. One of the most interesting was with Jeremiah McNichols of ZRecommends, who had a lot of interesting thoughts about the complex relationship between sponsors and bloggers. While the first BlogHer conference, in 2005, seemed to be about empowering women bloggers, today, empowerment appears to be about “look how powerful we are, corporations take us seriously and want to give us free swag!” But of course, if blogging becomes mainly about accepting free swag and loving the corporations, well, that’s not empowerment, that’s more like oppression - a slightly more subtle form of oppression, perhaps, maybe willing oppression. It doesn’t bode well for the power of blogging to actually spread the voices of the people, though, if the people are happy to speak for the corporations.

I want to write (and think) more about those connections, and I’ll definitely try to post more about it - not until after we move, though!