Takahashi slides @ SMC

I did a talk on creative net cultures at the Norrlandsoperan restaurant today. The event was arranged by Social Media Club in Umeå, and I was glad to see that so many people turned up for my lunch lecture. The crowd was mixed, the reaction was good, and all in all it was nice — as always — to meet practitioners working in those fields that I research.

The SMC people had warned me that the large windows of the restaurant tended to make it difficult to show any slides in there. Still, I decided to try it anyway, but with super clear slides. I then remembered having read about the Takahashi presentation method a while back. I did a variant of that by using extra large text on my slides — even though not switching slides as rapidly as seems to be required for a textbook Takahashi or Lessig presentation and it worked out nice.

Veblen: Thinking on the margins

Norwegian-American cultural sociologist and economist Thorstein Bunde Veblen is most famous for his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class. In that book, he introduced the concept of “conspicuous consumption” and formulated a theory of social distiction through acts of consumption that predated Pierre Bourdieus similiar ideas in Distinction (1979). In this month’s issue of Wired magazine, the article “Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up“ by Jonah Lehrer discusses a lesser known but very interesting contribution made by Veblen:

In 1918, sociologist Thorstein Veblen was commissioned by a popular magazine devoted to American Jewry to write an essay on how Jewish “intellectual productivity” would be changed if Jews were given a homeland. At the time, Zionism was becoming a potent political movement, and the magazine editor assumed that Veblen would make the obvious argument: A Jewish state would lead to an intellectual boom, as Jews would no longer be held back by institutional anti-Semitism. But Veblen, always the provocateur, turned the premise on its head. He argued instead that the scientific achievements of Jews — at the time, Albert Einstein was about to win the Nobel Prize and Sigmund Freud was a best-selling author — were due largely to their marginal status. In other words, persecution wasn’t holding the Jewish community back — it was pushing it forward.

The reason, according to Veblen, was that Jews were perpetual outsiders, which filled them with a “skeptical animus.” Because they had no vested interest in “the alien lines of gentile inquiry,” they were able to question everything, even the most cherished of assumptions. Just look at Einstein, who did much of his most radical work as a lowly patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. According to Veblen’s logic, if Einstein had gotten tenure at an elite German university, he would have become just another physics professor with a vested interest in the space-time status quo. He would never have noticed the anomalies that led him to develop the theory of relativity.

Predictably, Veblen’s essay was potentially controversial, and not just because he was a Lutheran from Wisconsin. The magazine editor evidently was not pleased; Veblen could be seen as an apologist for anti-Semitism. But his larger point is crucial: There are advantages to thinking on the margin. When we look at a problem from the outside, we’re more likely to notice what doesn’t work. Instead of suppressing the unexpected, shunting it aside with our “Oh shit!” circuit and Delete key, we can take the mistake seriously. A new theory emerges from the ashes of our surprise.

Modern science is populated by expert insiders, schooled in narrow disciplines. Researchers have all studied the same thick textbooks, which make the world of fact seem settled. This led Kuhn, the philosopher of science, to argue that the only scientists capable of acknowledging the anomalies — and thus shifting paradigms and starting revolutions — are “either very young or very new to the field.” In other words, they are classic outsiders, naive and untenured. They aren’t inhibited from noticing the failures that point toward new possibilities.

Aside from the provocation and controversy, this seems like a perfect ideal for good research: be sceptical, question everything, think on the margins, stay naive, and let theories emerge from the ashes of your surprise.

Research update

I am sending in two applications for research funding this week. One is on social media and political participation, and the other is on independent computer games and subcultural innovation. I will take part in VIRT3C in Hull, UK in March, and I also recently started a collaboration with the Crisis and Media Society Research Program at Helsinki University. Later this week, we will host yet another event in HUMlab. This time it is about presenting our research to potential funders. My slide for that is posted above. It was a bit of a challenge to summarize my research into one single image, but I guess it will work.

Online porn fan discourse

An edited volume featuring a chapter written by me was just published in Peter Lang’s series on Digital Formations. Feona Attwood, who does highly interesting research on new pornographies, online sex practices, and controversial images at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, did a great job editing this book. It also seems as if there will be an AOIR panel based on the book at the Gothenburg conference in October. I really hope that I can participate in that, even though my autumn programme is already filling up. Returning to the book, this is the description from the publisher:

porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography Ed. Feona Attwood.
Digital Formations/Peter Lang

Pornography has often been central to debates about sex and about new media technologies as they emerge, and today debate is increasingly focused on online pornographies. This collection examines pornography’s significance as a focus of definition, debate and myth, its development as a mainstream entertainment industry, and the emergence of a new economy of Porn 2.0 and of new types of porn labor and professionalism. It looks at porn style behind the scenes of straight hardcore, in gay, lesbian, and queer pornographies, in shock sites, and in amateur erotica. It investigates the rise of the online porn fan community, the sex blogger, the erotic rate-me site and the visual cultures of swingers. Treating these developments as part of a broader set of economic and cultural transformations, the book argues that new porn practices reveal much about contemporary and competing views of sex and the self, the real and the body, culture and commerce.

My chapter is entitled “Widening the Glory Hole: the Discourse of Online Porn Fandom” and explores participation and communication in online porn fandom. The traditional image of the porn consumer is that of the perverted and shamed loner. In pre-internet times such an image was probably rather adequate, and even today – when pornographic materials are easier and easier to come by – it is still a qualified guess that most porn consumption takes place in individualized and private situations. The porn audience, thus described, becomes an archetype of late modern man: Part of a global media and consumer culture, yet detached and left to himself. Blasé and numb from visual overload, yet constantly looking for new sensations (cf. Baudrillard etc.). In this type of male user, pornography is an expression of “episodic sexuality” and the will to sexually control women – an urge that gets increasingly compulsive as traditional roles and structures are liquefied in late modernity (cf. Giddens etc.).

But what happens, I ask, to the audience when porn goes online? The anonymous masturbatory onlooker certainly remains, but porn inevitably also reaches new audiences. The Internet has brought pornography, by its exploding availability, closer to the popular culture mainstream (cf. Paasonen, McNair, Attwood etc.), and in so doing connected it to audiences more like those of popular culture in general. The aim of my chapter is to analyze how porn users collectively construct their viewer position in the online community FreeOnes <http://board.freeones.com/>. The discussion of empirical material gathered from conversations on this bulletin board takes current research on participatory culture and fandom as its point of departure (cf. Jenkins; Hills) in assessing how audience members consume, use and integrate pornography in their everyday lives.

Common Culture of Umeå

I was invited to give a talk this Saturday at the free culture festival Common Culture of Umeå. I presented some of the results from my research project about cultures of online piracy, and concluded with discussing a set of theoretical concepts relating to the field of participatory culture in general. This event was a great opportunity to talk about, and discuss, issues that I do research on with young people that take an active part in such subcultures that interest me from the academic perspective.

It was inspiring to see that my research results and perspectives seemed to converge with their ways of thinking, even though we have come into this field from different directions, and navigate it in different ways. I have been toying for some time with the idea of writing something about what I would call “subcultural innovation”, and this experience fuelled these ideas even more.

The economy of linguistic exchange in gaming culture

I was interviewed today by Språktidningen, a Swedish monthly magazine about language issues. The article for which I was contacted will be printed in the January edition and deals with the specialized language in gaming culture, and the difficulties for game reviewers and cultural journalists to make games accessible to a wide audience of people of various generations.

This dilemma is further emphasized in a non-English speaking setting, where gaming discourse not only includes a lot of specialized terminology but also a lot of loan words. I think that gaming language must be seen in the context of sub or youth cultural language. This means that specialized jargon has been developed for reasons other than purely technological. Furthermore, many online cultures related to gaming are quite hierarchal and langue plays a big part in maintaining distinctions in these cases. As gaming is moved into the mainstream, these linguistic patterns live on. My contribution to the article, from the perspective of cultural sociology, revolved around the following points:

Dick Hebdige illustrated in Subculture: The meaning of style (1979) that membership in subcultures is signalled through specific uses of mannerisms and argot. Argot is a French, Spanish and Catalan word for “slang” or “secret language”. Argot is used by various groups “to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations”. “The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, hobby, job, sport, etc”.¹

“Notions concerning the sanctity of language are intimately bound up with social order. The limits of acceptable linguistic expression are prescribed by a number of apparently universal taboos. These taboos guarantee the continuing ‘transparency’ (the taken-for-grantedness) of meaning. Predictably then, violations of the authorized codes through which the social world is organized and experienced have considerable power to provoke and disturb” (Hebdige 1979, p. 91).

Cultures such as those characterizing gaming, online piracy, IRC chats, hacking, etc. are often hierachal. The status divisions between n00bs and more established members in online culture in general are one example of this. Bowker and Liu (2001) have written about this in terms of gender differences, and Blashki & Nichol (2005) have illustrated how so called 1337 5p34k (leetspeak) has its roots in gaming culture.

Pierre Bourdieu writes in the seminal article on “The economy of linguistic exchanges” (1977) of “legitimate language”, and of how language is connected to “relations of symbolic power”.

“A person speaks not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished.” (p. 648)

“Linguistic competence (like any other cultural competence) functions as linguistic capital in relationship with a certain market.” (p. 651)

Renegotiating gender subjectivities in MTV’s Jackass

Today, a paper that I co-authored with Maxime Lélièvre was published in Critical Studies in Media Communication. The title of the article is “In the Laboratory of Masculinity: Renegotiating Gender Subjectivities in MTV’s Jackass“. This is the article abstract:

This article presents a content analysis of all 25 episodes of the popular television series Jackass aired on MTV between 2000 and 2002 and of the two movies Jackass: The Movie (2002) and Jackass Number Two (2006). Starting with a brief discussion of white male backlash and representations of masculinity in crisis, we move on to show that the text of Jackass seems to reaffirm hegemonic masculinity while still maintaining an ambiguous position vis-à-vis the ideals of machismo and hyper-virility. This, at first hand, may appear as a paradox. Our argument, however, is that if one reads Jackass from outside of, what Judith Butler calls, ‘‘the heterosexual matrix,’’ things do not appear that paradoxical at all. Seeing that gender subjectivities are not essentially fixed or naturally given, Jackass can instead be read in terms of the symbolic struggle between different forms of masculinity within a dialectical process of change throughout history.

Contact me for the full article if interested.

DVIS at the Swedish victimological conference

Today, we are presenting a new research project called DVIS – Domestic Violence and the Internet in Sweden. The goal of this project is to map how victims of domestic violence in Sweden are using the internet and social media both to find information and to connect with networks of people that they may not otherwise have access to when living in situations of domestic violence.

This project is planned over three years, and will end with a symposium to which policy makers, victim’s rights advocates, and researchers will be invited in order to start a discussion about domestic violence victims’ habits online and how we can learn from these habits so as to provide information and support to the people who need it.

One thing that we have noticed, just in the short amount of time since we have begun this project, is how much networking and conversation is going on outside of forums that are dedicated to domestic abuse support. Perhaps this is an issue of safety, as cookies to places like Post Secret, Twitter and Second Life landmarks are not as dangerous as cookies to women’s (and men’s) help organizations. Actually, PostSecret has a very interesting and active community and when postcards are posted that talk about abuse, there are often many instances of other’s ‘reporting’ or showing solidarity through telling similar accounts.

Beyond systems of support, what happens when this technology – that we argue could play an important role in providing a social network when real-world networks have been removed – is used against the victim? If the aide agency does not have a warning, will the user think of clearing – or know how to clear – the browser history? Will pictures posted on Facebook of a child’s birthday party, which the uploader thought only a select few would be able to see, but due to holes in security when commenting on something, provide a way for an abuser to find the victim’s location?

More information about the DVIS project can be found on the project’s website here.

The presentation that we will give today can be found here (in Swedish).

Helsinki reflections

I am now on my way home from the international conference on Violence and Network Society: School Shootings and Social Violence in Contemporary Public Life hosted by the Department of Communciation at Helsinki University. All in all, this two-day cross disciplinary event about the mediation and communication of school shootings, terrorism and other forms of social violence was excellent. The first conference day was ended with a strong performance “About the Making of a Dangerous Individual” by British/Finnish artist Steve Pratt. I also got the chance to chat with Steve, and he gave me DVD of one of his performances relating to communicating controversial content through video, and we agreed that I should give him some comments on that from my research perspective. The second day of the conference was ended on a similarly thought provoking note with the screening of  Estonian director Ilmar Raags movie “The Class“. Raag also took part in one of the conference panels.

For my own part, I managed to get in contact with a number of interesting people, most notably a group of visual researchers from Jacobs University Bremen headed by Professor Marion G. Müller, but I also had interesting conversations with the three prominent keynote speakers (Douglas Kellner, Barbie Zelizer, and Stewart Clegg) as well as with a number of other people that I plan to stay in contact with, for example Glenn Muschert and Kari-Andén Papadopoulos. My own presentation went really well, and there seemed to be a large interest in the methods I have used. In the sessions I attended, I particularly enjoyed the presentation on “Violence, Victims and Emotionality in Finnish Crime-Appeal Programming” by Mirka Smolej. Her interesting research is quite reminiscent of things I work on in my project on crime victims in the Swedish press.

Mapping participatory media discourse on school shooting videos

In November, I will go to Helsinki for the conference Violence and Network Society: School Shootings and Social Violence in Contemporary Public Life. The title of my paper is YouTube Gunmen? Mapping participatory media discourse on school shooting videos. I just finished it, and feel quite satisfied with the ways in which I managed to mix some semi-experimental use of Google Trends data, with the discourse visualization techniques that I have been working on recently. Please, email me for the full draft if you are interested. Below are two excerpts (abstract + conclusions).

[...]

Before the school shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, as well as before the similar tragedies in Finnish Jokela 2007 and Kauhajoki 2009, the gunmen gave warnings by posting video clips on YouTube. This fact was strongly emphasized in the subsequent news media coverage of these events, and generally it can be said that there seems to have been a media panic about violence and the internet in the aftermath of the shootings. The aim of this paper is to look beyond the assumption that the panic reaction is all-encompassing. Firstly, I will review some search engine and online news statistics in order to evaluate the existence and extent of a panic reaction. Secondly, I will analyze YouTube user comment discourse on school shooting clips. Telling from previous research, it seems reasonable to assume that such participatory media discourse differs largely from traditional news media discourse. The overarching question is whether the panic reaction sequence can be identified in the YouTube comment discourse, or if the latter displays a different pattern.

[...]

Even though the moral panic reaction sequence can be clearly identified in news reporting as well as search traffic relating to issues at the intersection of digital media and school shootings, the main result of this paper is that broadly applying the panic perspective would paint a simplified picture of the emerging new media landscape where audiences play an increasingly active role as co-producers of content (Gauntlett, 2004; Jenkins, 2006b; Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, & Robinson, 2009).

In line with this, Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton (1995) have suggested that the emergence of “multi-mediated social worlds” require a revision of how moral panics are conceived of. While Cohen’s original model was developed for a society where media were univocal, and hegemonical relations were monolithic, today’s media are characterized by fragmentation and multiplicity. McRobbie and Thornton argue that classic moral panic studies (such as Hall et al. 1978; Pearson 1983) have a tendency to overstate the power of hegemony and social control, while understating the role played by counter-discourses. In the age of participatory media it becomes increasingly important to “take account of a plurality of reactions, each with their different constituencies, effectivities and modes of discourse” (McRobbie and Thornton 1995, 564). With this argument, McRobbie and Thornton call for an exploration of various mass, niche and micro-media.

In this paper I have analyzed one such mode of discourse in one particular medium, namely YouTube user comments to school shooting videos. The comment threads under analysis illustrate that the media is to a diminishing degree something that is separable from society. The analyzed texts are not reports on, or narratives about, the school shootings in the traditional media sense. Instead, they illustrate the process wherein social reality is “experienced through language, communication and imagery” (McRobbie and Thornton 1995, 570). The reality of school shootings is continuously being defined in these comment threads, as users discuss issues of bullying, high school culture, gun control, and racism, while at the same time publically, socially, and emotionally trying to deal with the trauma of these events.

[...]