Pirate discourse talk

This is my talk, given today at the NMIC2010 conference.

Bonus material (questions and discussion) can be found here.

NMIC2010 in Istanbul

This week, I am attending NMIC2010 in the lovely city of Istanbul. The 2nd International Conference of New Media and Interactivity brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and countries to discuss topics such as the theoretical and conceptual framework of new media, new media and visual culture, networks and web technologies, and everyday life and new media.

This morning, I had the opportunity to listen to Christine Ogan – one of the keynote speakers – who gave an interesting talk about the role played by mass communication theory in the process wherein new theory has been developed in the field of new media research in the last ten years.

In the afternoon, I attended a number of interesting paper presentations: M. Hank Hausler spoke of urban digital media displays and the development of a protocol for generating collaborative creative content generation on such screens. At the intersection of architecture, information and culture, there is a lot of work to be done to meet the needs emerging from new modes of communication, and new ways of appropriating and navigating urban space. The things that are being done by Hank’s research group (UrbanAid, University of Sydney) seem really promising and exciting as regards possibilities for turning urban environments into connected multi-media spaces.

Melda Öncü Yıldız had written a thought-provoking paper on how the use of 3D computer graphics in movies affect the narrative and mode of storytelling, using examples from Star Trek, Star Wars, Tron, Lord of the Rings etc. to discuss this.

My colleague Ragnar Lundström did very well with his presentation on Representations of Benefit Fraud: Comparing Newspaper and Blog Discourse in Sweden and the UK. The talk was well delivered and generated the most engaged discussion of all of the papers in his session. All of the papers from NMIC2010 are available in a phonebook sized proceedings volume that will hopefully be available online in the near future.

Fanfiction futures

a video about fanfiction and its potential

the #ashtag and collaboration

A quick and dirty analysis of Twitter #ashtag discourse, using what the hashtag?? for data collection and Pajek for visualization.

from simon lindgren on Vimeo.

youtube taglines archeology

A methods exercise based on “TheWebsite” at Digital Methods Initiative.

from simon lindgren on Vimeo.

In the wake of the Bjästa case

The Bjästa case, more thoroughly described by bénédicte at http://snegourotchka.blogspot.com has been a quite major news event in Sweden lately. There is a 58 minute documentary from Swedish television available here. In brief, the case revolves around the rape of a 14 year old girl by an older boy in a school toilet in the small town of Bjästa in Sweden. She reported this to the police, the boy confessed, but still no one believed her. Adults and kids alike all seemed to think that, because he was too handsome and kind, it could never be true that the boy in question had committed a sexual offense. Social media has been a highlighted topic in news reporting and other public discourse on the events as much of the hate campaign towards the victim seems to have taken place through such platforms. There was, for example, a Facebook support group for the perpetrator.

I was invited to Örnsköldsvik, close to Bjästa, this Saturday to an event where youth workers, teachers, NGO representatives, politicians, as well as people in general gathered to discuss how to “deal with” youth culture, morality, and social media in the wake of these events. My main point was that the Bjästa case, even though illustrating the great potential of social media to mobilize people and to get your message out (no matter what it may be), could of course had happened just as well without these tools. I devoted my talk to try to give an objective account of the potential as well as pitfalls of using digital media for social and cultural aims. Around 150 people turned up, and my contribution was well-received. It feels good to take part in these kinds of things when you actually feel that you can make some sort of difference. The radio coverage as well as the tv coverage of the event is available online.

Popular culture and politics

I was recently interviewed by RadioUPF for a feature about politics, popular culture, and social media. The feature, including a couple of quotes from me as well as from Dagmar Brunow and Johan Höglund, is available here [in Swedish].

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The effort of being immersed

Yesterday, I hosted a talk at my department by Jonas Linderoth (University of Gothenburg) entitled The effort of being in a fictional world: Upkeyings and laminated frames in MMORPGs. Its topic was hard core role playing subcultures within the World of Warcraft community, and it illustrated how these players — wanting to achieve a maximum level of authenticity and immersion in their gaming — navigate the nexus between rules/ludology and fiction/narratology. Immersion does not come easy, which is something that the moral entrepreneurs who see nothing but dangers in MMO gaming seem to think. Rather, it takes a lot of hard work to actually “lose grip of reality”.

The presentation made me realize that I really have to look more into Goffman’s frame analysis, which is something that I have been meaning to do for quite some time now. Also, “Hamlet on the Holodeck” by Janet Murray seems to be important reading to anyone interested in cultural and linguistic aspects of digital cultures. There is more information on Jonas Linderoth here, and those who understand Swedish will definitely enjoy his talk WTF r u female IRL?!? from the latest Dreamhack festival.

virt3c@hull, day 2

The second day of VIRT3C included even more interesting meetings and presentations. Mathieu O’Neil spoke on the possibilities of doing research on the net and being critical. According to him, critique is about distance. You establish a distance from an object and look at it while standing away from it. Sociology is a history of the present, and being critical in the context of sociology therefore means standing outside of the present. Mathieu applied Bourdieu’s field theory to internet networks, and also mentioned an interesting paper The Sociology of Culture in Computer-Mediated Communication by Elizabeth Lawley.

Stefan Merten of Oekonux gave a great talk about peer production. Peer production is not “facebook”, it is a production process featuring external and internal openness. It is based on Selbstentfaltung. In short, Selbstentfaltung is an important precondition for peer production, which merges individual well-being with societal needs. Volunteers contribute what they select themselves, which guarantees non-alienated leadership.

sub*culture

My talk from VIRT3C@Hull 2010

from simon lindgren on Vimeo.