jill/txt

Today’s class is the second day of students presenting their projects. Two students can’t make it; they’re home sick with h1n1 / swine flu, the poor things.

Many students have worried about how to define a remix. The best article we’ve found that does this is probably Eduardo Navas’ The Three Basic Forms of Remix: A Point of Entry, published in Remix Theory on April 26, 2007. He starts by looking at defining it in music: “A music remix, in general, is a reinterpretation of a pre-existing song, meaning that the “aura”� of the original will be dominant in the remixed version” - so as remixes started, they were generally only remixing a single source. Navas then argues that there are three main kinds of remixes: extended, selective, or reflexive, where the remix “allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the original; material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact to be recognizable”. Extended or selective remixes might be similar to the homages we see on YouTube, where someone fawningly pastes in lots of images of their heros from a movie that are shown with a music track, while the reflexive remix would be the critical or parodic kind that’s common in political remixes. Other things than art can be remixed too - Neva found a discussion of how concepts and information can be remixed, and Elisabeth is writing about biological and genetic remixes.

[Elisabeth showed us another article with a further categorisation, which I can’t find now… will add later.]

Some students will have to discuss whether or not their examples are remixes at all - is the collaborative BlueSfear.com art worm that Neva’s writing about a remix? Is She’s the Man a remix of Twelfth Night, as Franziska wants to argue?

Next week, Maria Engberg is coming from Sweden to talk about appropriation in avantegarde art of the twentieth century and how it relates to current digital culture. I’ve posted some readings she’ll be using in Studentportalen/My Space. The following week is the conference which you’re all welcome to attend (if you want lunch and/or dinner, there’s a fee), then we’ll be looking at your videos on November 12 and November 17. Your final paper and video are due on November 20, and we’ll have a premiere party in the evening of November 20, with a screening of all the videos!

I just gave a talk for Forskning.no’s seminar about research dissemination/popularisation, Fra forskning til forside v3.0. Here are the slides:

I had to leave right after my talk, because my Remix Culture students are presentating their research projects at noon, but I was able to hear Ove Dalen’s talk before mine about how to write online. He gave an engaging presentation with some interesting points: did you know that we now read more of an article presented online than we would if it were presented on paper? Also, while Jacob Nielsen in 1997 found that 80% of us scan online texts rather than reading them, that number’s dropped to around 50% according to a study by Poynter in 2009 (I’ll have to ask Ove Dalen for a more complete source for that: luckily he’s on Twitter so that’ll be easy!). Oh, and the first thing we notice on a website? The text, not the images. Ove Dalen has written a couple of books on writing for the web, and gives classes frequently, so I’ve seen his work online regularly over the last years, but this is the first time I’ve heard him speak in person.

A couple of students are writing about how remix videos work as memes, and how they spread, and have asked whether Richard Brodie’s Virus of the Mind is an acceptable academic source to use in their essays. I haven’t read Virus of the Mind yet, but from its presentation, it’s pitched as popular science. You can certainly use it as a source, but obviously not as your only source. It seems that Virus of the Mind has a fairly extreme argument, if the first line of the Amazon.com editorial review is accurate:

If you’ve ever wondered how and why people become robotically enslaved by advertising, religion, sexual fantasy, and cults, wonder no more. It’s all because of “mind viruses,” or “memes,” and those who understand how to plant them into other’s minds.

“Robotically enslaved”? My goodness. That’s even stronger than the metaphors Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, and Ana Domb Krauskopf argued against in their report on Spreadable Media. Jenkins et.al. argue that biological metaphors such as “meme” (based on evolution and genetical replication) and “virus” cast the people who enjoy and pass on cool stuff they find as having no agency at all. I disagree with the way Dawkins’ original article about memes is portrayed here, but certainly think that thinking of regular people who enjoy cute cat videos as being “robotically enslaved” is a little over the top. Perhaps the reviewer is not describing the full argument in Virus of the Mind very well, though.

Even Dawkins, who invented the term meme, wouldn’t go with the “robotically enslaved” argument, I think. He finishes his chapter proposing the idea of memes by pointing out that humans have conscious foresight and rational minds, and are actually able to choose according to long term goals rather than just going with the short term gratification of genes and memes that, for instance, may tend not to encourage altruism and peace:

One unique feature of man, which may or may not have evolved memically, is his capacity for conscious foresight. Selfish genes (and, if you alllow the speculation of this chapter, memes too) have no foresight. They are unconscious, blind, replicators. (..) We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. (..) We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our own creators.

So sure, go ahead and use Virus of the Mind in your papers, but think critically about it, and for goodness sakes, discuss the assertions made in it, using the skepticism of Jenkins et.al. and of Dawkins and perhaps others as well. You may end up agreeing with Brodie, but you have to show that you’re doing so because you’ve thought carefully about it, and that you understand the counter-arguments and possible problems with his thesis. Also make sure you present Brodie appropriately - what are his credentials? I only quickly googled him but it looks like he developed Microsoft Word (!), is a professional poker player and has written self-help books - so he’s not exactly a scientist or researcher? If you’re going to argue strongly for Brodie you may need to find more supporting sources. He may well refer to some good ones in his book.

Nick Montfort linked to a rather wonderful new piece that poet William Gillespie (of The Unknown fame and publisher and author at Spineless Books) read from yesterday at the &Now festival: MORPHEUS 11, the story of a poet sent to Alpha Centauri to test a nuclear bomb that can destroy a plant, who returns to Earth to discover that Earth has a ring instead of a moon and that there is - perhaps - no longer life there.

The story is told linearly and lasts for about 20 minutes, with no opportunity to pause or rewind - it’s worth watching in a single setting though, both for the story itself and for the grungy space visuals created by Travis Alber: a scratched metal background with a window through which to watch the stars passing by, and dream images superimposed on or maybe reflected in the dull, stained metal.

Eerie music (composed by David Schmudde) supports the words and images. Some of the words pass by as fast as you can read them, while others wait patiently until you click the arrow leading onwards. But you’re always led onwards, and while at first this insistent linearity annoyed me, after a while I sat back and relaxed into it, accepting my temporary and voluntary capitivity as having a certain symmetry to the narrator’s - although my clock was a lot faster than that on his spaceship or that spinning round representign the Earth’s time.

The plot of the story reads a little like an echo of science fiction tales I imagine I have read before - the lonely astronaut, the world that destroys itself (over and over in fiction) but the telling is more poetic than a political commentary - America declares war on China, but no reason is given, other than the political situation being increasingly difficult. The true story is perhaps not the political allegory that characterises so much science fiction, but that of the disconnect between astronaut and earth. He looked forward to the mission, looked forward to being alone, to reading vastly and to writing poems. At first communications work well and he sends a poem to Earth every week. But as he is further and further away, contact with Earth becomes increasingly asynchronous. His wife divorces him. He dreams of a red haired woman, but later, in dreams, her son attacks his son, and he contributes to her death. And on returning to Earth, it is empty, completely changed. Even Plato’s works (on his electronic reader) have changed. There is nothing to return to.

Despite the final throbbing question left hanging in the air (until the reader decides there’s probably no more and closes the browser window) there’s more beauty than sadness to this piece. The idea that a poet would be the one sent (willingly) to explode a far-off planet leaves me smiling (bizarrely) and thinking that I might have to watch this piece again.

Definitely worth its twenty minutes.

I’m giving a talk at the Wikipedia Academy in Bergen Oct 14-15, and since it’s the Wikipedia, I thought it would be better form to plot the talk out in a blog post rather than making a shiny Powerpoint. Here’s the abstract, titled “Has Wikipedia grown up?”

[Update Jan 4, 2010: the “>video of the talk is now up]

Historically, social media sites don’t last for long. The Wikipedia has lasted far longer than most of its peers, but will it last forever?

The Wikipedia seems to have avoided the last phase - spam and monetization. Or at least, spam is largely kept at bay. Unfortunately, I think the greatest threat to the Wikipedia is its community.

I’m one of those occasional contributors who sometimes adds content about topics I’m an expert on. I find the nitty gritty editing and the debates between deletionists and inclusionists rather dull. In fact, until I started gathering links for this talk, I hadn’t logged in to my account in a few months, and was surprised to find on my talk page that one of the articles I contributed had been nominated for deletion. Fortunately nobody except the nominator wanted it deleted (one person even posted a great link to a statement by Jimmy Wales about how we should relax and accomodate someone who adds a good article about a possibly trivial thing. But really: what a wonderful confirmation of the recent articles arguing that the Wikipedia is scaring away the experts… I add information about something I’m knowledgeable about and it’s nominated for deletion by someone who calls a major research centre a “club/organization”? In both the articles I started that have been nominated for deletion, the nominator clearly knows nothing about the topic whatsoever.

My unhappy reunion with the Wikipedia easily connects to recent reports that the number of contributors to the Wikipedia is stagnating. Perhaps because there already are articles on most obvious encyclopedia topics. Or perhaps because of the Wikipedians, that tight community of copy-editors. Sue Gardner of the Wikimedia Foundation argues that the natural resource of the Wikipedia is emotion, “the rush of joy that you get the first time you make an edit to Wikipedia, and you realize that 330 million people are seeing it live”. Today most often that edit will be deleted.

And who deletes it?

The thing that surprised me the most in Jimmy Wales’ presentation on Wednesday was the extremely skewed demographics of Wikipedia contributors - 85% male, 65% or so single, almost all childless, and heavily weighted towards the under-thirties. I actually hadn’t realised how out of place I am as a contributor, old, married mother that I am. Given that the contributors are so young, male, childless and single, the idea that the Wikipedia has “grown up” seems rather out of place.

Mind you, as far as I can tell, these demographics are self-reported by heavy Wikipedia contributors, so quite likely not very representative. This preliminary survey analysis seems to be the source. Here (as a PDF) are the slides Wales spoke from, pretty much.

And the readers are a different kettle of fish. In Norway, at least, the Wikipedia is mainstream. When I tweeted about the demographics Wales presented, Petter Bae Brandtzæg, a PhD fellow at SINTEF, sent me some more info and gave me a link to slides for a talk he gave in Trondheim today with lots of statistics on Norwegian usage of social media. Slide 14 shows how huge the Wikipedia is and how fast it’s still growing. Over 2/3 of online Norwegian read it at least once a month. But slide 15 shows that daily or weekly reading is skewed by gender - 35% of men and only 21% women read the Wikipedia that often. However, Pew Internet found a far more even gender balance: in 2007, 39% of US men online read the Wikipedia, as did 34% of US women online. The differences make you wonder about the surveys’ methodologies.

[An aside: Men “define the net” Brandtzæg writes. I think that is to leave out vast portions of the net - google anything to do with children, pregnancy, home, work-life balance, crafts or fashion and you’ll find women discussing it extensively. These things are a major part of the net, though perhaps invisible to those who don’t participate in these discussions. Also, a presentation from Pew Internet given just last week gives stats showing that there are more women than men using social networking sites (see slide 8) - this is another major part of “the net” that’s left out of Brantzæg’s assertion. Regardless: I’m rather saddened that the gender differences are so traditional.]

Anyway, let’s get back to the Wikipedia. I think the question of demographics is huge. And yes, I definitely think it can scare people away. Look at any nomination for deletion, say this current nomination that the article on WoWWiki be deleted, for instance, and the bickering and aggression is really very off-putting. Someone wants it deleted because WoW is stupid. Great. Someone else thinks that numerous academic articles citing WoWWiki doesn’t show its notability because academic articles are “primary sources” and Wikipedia doesn’t allow original research in articles. Talk about misunderstanding. This discussion certainly sounds as though its being conducted by those sad 18 year old boys who can’t find girlfriends.

boyd’s law: “Adding more users to a social network [site] increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” With the Wikipedia, the problem is that it’s too good. There are so many articles out there that most of the activity is nit-picking.

Clearly we need copy-editors, which to a large extent is what “wikipedians” are. Without them, most articles would probably look like an “incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids (..) that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts”, as Nicholas Carr accused the articles on George Bush and Jane Fonda of being in 2006.

But there’s a rather dangerous balance between the copy-editors and the content-contributors. Certainly the copy-editors - the “Wikipedians” - do most of the editing. According to Aaron Schwartz in his interesting article “Who Writes Wikpedia“, Jimmy Wales has said that:

it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”

However, when Aaron Schwartz looked at several individual articles, analysing instead who had contributed the most content (i.e. words) rather than simply moved things around or formatted things, the proportions were almost reversed. Most of the content is contributed by people who have made less than 50 edits to the Wikipedia in total.

That might turn the demographics around significantly, too. Maybe 85% of the copy-editors and formatters are young, childless, single men, but occasional contributors - the people who actually write the Wikipedia - are more representative of the general population?

I love the Wikipedia, and I hate the Wikipedia. Most of what I hate about it is the bickering, the ignorance and the hidden agendas camouflaged by acronyms and templates and bragging about superior knowledge of the rules of Wikipedia. What I love about it is the content, the articles, and the freedom. I want to be able to read an article about anything I’m curious about. I’m thrilled to finally have access to a copy of something very close to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Despite the work of dedicated field researchers such as Ford Prefect, much of the contributions to the Guide are made on a strictly ad-hoc basis. With the permanent staff more likely to be on a lunch break than working, “most of the actual work got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing.”[7] This has led to the Guide being patchy in its coverage, cobbled together (Its entry on “The Universe” was copied from the back of a packet of breakfast cereal)[8] and often riddled with errors.

I want the Wikipedia to still be around in ten, fifteen, twenty years time.

The semester is more than half-done and there’s only a little over a month until research papers and videos are due. So Thursday’s class will be about figuring out where we’re up to, making sure everyone has drafted their literature review and that everyone has a plan for how to structure their paper. Students who complete their literature reviews and indicate a clear direction for their further research - and post this to their blogs before midnight on October 18 - will receive individual written feedback from me as well.

Looking at the schedule ahead this is really our only chance to work together on our projects before the presentations on Oct 27 and 29. I’ll ask students to sign up for presentation slots today. Here’s what I want you to do in these presentations:

• Prepare a five minute presentation of your research paper. You may use powerpoint or show websites if that’s helpful.
• Make sure you tell us the following:
  • What is your research question?
  • What have other researchers written about this previously?
  • What is your point of view? Your conclusion?
• This is a presentation of your research paper, not of your video. Make your video afterwards!
• You will need to blog documentation of your presentation. This can be the full text of your talk, powerpoint slides (post them to slideshare.net) or you can record your talk on video and post that to your blog.

After each presentation, we’ll have time for a little discussion and feedback.

Don’t start working on your videos until you’ve done a lot of work on your research paper. We’ll view drafts of videos in our last class, on November 12.

There are some great events coming up in Bergen in the next couple of weeks:

• Oct 14-15 at Bryggens Museum: Wikipedia Academy. Jimmy Wales is speaking tomorrow morning, and many more will speak in the next couple of days (I’m squeezing in Thursday morning)
• Oct 15, Landmark at 7 pm: Piksel Plenum - a discussion on piracy and copyright in relation to creative production and distribution.
• Oct 20: At Sjøfartsmuséet. JoinGame, a national research network for studying games, is hosting a workshop focusing on ARGs and pervasive games as well as game journalism. Attendence is free (and lunch and dinner are included in that) but you have to sign up by the end of Oct 14th to get in. Anyone who’s interested is welcome.
• Oct 21: Charles Ess is speaking from 12:15 on The Embodied Self in a Digital Age as a guest at our research group. The talk is open to all and free.
• Oct 21: NONA’s first Bergen-based meeting is on computational journalism, with Nick Diakopoulos as the main speaker. 5 pm and onwards.
• Oct 22: Machinima evening III at Landmark, 7 pm, hosted by Linn Søvig and Chang Hyun Choi. This is the third of an excellent series of talks and viewings of some of the best machinima out there. I was at the first of these evenings, and loved it.

I think that’s it for the next couple of weeks - and then November 8-10 is the conference Scott is organising, The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice, which I think will be very inspiring, there are some great people coming.

The only sad thing about all these exciting things happening right in my own back yard is that I’m not going to be able to attend them all - pregnant mums of very small children simply don’t have the time it would take, or at least I don’t, especially as my main pregnancy symptom (apart from a rapidly growing belly) is extreme sleepiness. Have you ever tried needing 10-11 hours sleep a day? I actually felt more rested when I had sleepless nights with a newborn than pregnant last time round. I’ll squeeze in some of these events, for sure, though!

Thursday’s class is the last in the series of guided introductions to theories that are relevant to remix culture, and deals with how user-generated media spreads. We’re reading Richard Dawkin’s chapter on memes from The Selfish Gene (1976), which introduces the idea of the meme, and Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf and Joshua Green’s white paper on Spreadable Media (2009), which argues that genetic and biological terms like meme or viral are not useful in understanding how these kinds of creation spread.

Today, we’ll pick some “memes” (we’ll figure out in class which ones) and analyse them:

1. Why do you think people forward/follow this meme?
2. Describe its longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity (after Dawkins) - do these affect its success?
3. Can you find other reasons for success? Discuss in terms of Jenkins’ et.al. list of qualities typical to successful spreadable media in part seven (see the bottom of this post for a brief list)
4. Write a blog post about your analysis.

One of the interesting things about Dawkins’ concept of the meme is that in building upon evolutionary genetics, he speculates that the characteristics that allow a gene to spread successfully may be more universal (”The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our own planet. There may be others.” p 192), and that perhaps the same principles apply to cultural memes, such as a popular song or the idea that a god exists. These three characteristics, Dawkins presumes, will be the same as those that characterise successful genes:

1. longevity: like molecules, unless memes last for a certain minimum time before dissolving or splitting up, they won’t be copied. For instance, and this is my example so I hope Dawkins would agree, for a tune to be successful it needs to be memorable enough that a person will hum it to themselves and want to hear it again, or maybe sing it to someone else. It doesn’t need to last forever, by any means, just long enough for new copies to be made - in someone else’s mind, or written down, or recorded, or re-played. (see p 17 for the molecular equivalent)
2. fecundity: How many copies does it generate? How fertile is it? For long term survival it needs to make many copies (the tune should be whistled by many people) but it also needs to continue to be copied for a long time.
3. copying-fidelity: Dawkins admits that his analogy may be shaky here, as ideas tend to change a little each time they’re repeated, in contrast to genes, which mutate, but certainly not with every copy. He suggests that maybe if seen at a small enough scale, memes are copied precisely. So for instance religion includes the meme of hell, that of there being a god, and so on.

It’s important to Dawkins that the natural selection of memes isn’t about what’s best for human genes, that is what’s good for us biologically. No, “a cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has simply because it is advantageous to itself” (p 200). For instance, the meme for celibacy in Catholic priests obviously isn’t good in terms of those priests spreading their genes - but it’s good for the spread of the meme of celibacy (i.e. it’s advantageous for itself) because celibacy means the priest doesn’t waste time on family, he spends it (among other things) convincing other young men to become celibate like himself. (p198) It’s also important to him (see his final two paragraphs) that also our genes and memes are selfish, we have the power of conscious foresight and don’t have to slavishly do whatever’s best for our genes and memes.

Jenkins, Li, Krauskopf and Green, on the other hand, argue that biological metaphors are not useful in understanding how media spread. Of course, Dawkins wasn’t really writing about internet “memes” like the Kanye West images or lolcats, he was writing more generally.

They don’t like the term “meme” or “viral” because (in Jenkin et. al.’s view) they emphasise replication and involuntary spread. Jenkins et.al. would rather emphasise the transformation of ideas as they are spread by communication between humans, and in particular they want to hold on to the idea of the people who spread a message or meme or “media content” being active and not dumb masses that marketers can do whatever they want to. They seem to like “viral” even less than “meme”, because it “reduces consumers to the involuntary “hosts” of media viruses”. They write: “Arguably, those ideas which survive are those which can be most easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities.”

I like their desire to show that “consumers” actually think and are active in the process - but I definitely think they simplify Dawkins - it’s telling that hardly any of the citations are to his own writing. And I definitely don’t think Dawkins would agree with all the things they attribute to him - that memes “explain everything from politics to fashion”, for instance. I also think that they conflate “viral” and “meme”, which doesn’t really treat the original idea of memes fairly.

Jenkins et al suggest a number of alternative names for us (i.e. people who use and pass on memes/media) - if viral media sets us as hosts or carriers of alien ideas, they prefer terms like “consumer” or “multiplier”. I don’t think these are much better, to be honest.

They differentiate between stickiness and spreadability, talk about the gift economy, what makes content worth spreading (comparing it to work on rumours, among other things) - this is in a general sense, though - we share things to build relationships and so forth.

In the seventh part, some specific characteristics of successful spreadable media are given:

1. humour
2. provides different levels of engagement (i.e. you don’t have to get all the in-jokes to like it)
3. or is parody and requires cultural knowledge (so makes you feel good about your knowledge and getting the joke)
4. makes you want to find more info, so you engage your network to do so - search for origins, what it really means, who made it, etc
5. “gaps”, interactivity, i.e. you have to do something for it to work
6. nostalgia and community

In class we came up with a few additional characteristics that might make us want to spread media:

• cute cats/babies (cuteness appears related to humour but is slightly different?)
• threats (bad things will happen to you if you don’t forward this chain letter to ten of your friends)
• help is needed (an infamous German example Franziska told us about was Heiko Spatz, who asks us to forward the email to as many people as possible to find a bone marrow donor - but the real Heiko Spatz knows nothing about it…)