Talking to the Digital Natives

The words "digital natives" have been falling out of favor with Internet researchers. It is even a term that has even achieved disrepute at the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, where the phrase was once regularly sprinkled in reports. To me, as I've explained, the words have sounded very much like nails on a chalkboard for a long time. I hate the way it calls up noble savages, natural competencies, and exotic others who feel content will maintaining a sharp generational divide in society. That's why the use of the phrase "digital natives" three times in the "Transparency Begins at Home" talk of the State Department's Richard Boly marred an otherwise good talk about in-house tools that diplomats are using to improve preparation and communication in a field with frequent dislocation and turnover by design.

In providing history of this federal department, he explained how in 1995 an e-mail could take two hours just to travel from one floor to another. Although "teaching diplomats how to type" proved to be a minor obstacle, the State Department had faced a number of other major obstacles in adopting new communications technologies, because of their dependence upon outdated Wang terminals at the dawn of the Microsoft Windows era.

As an example of one of the group's efforts to promote institutional memory, Boly pointed to Communities@State, which serves as the umbrella for a range of collaboratively oriented blogs from Afghan Strategic Communication to Japan Economic Scope. He also discussed Diplopedia and Deskipedia as part of their eDiplomacy initiatives, which focus on "knowledge management within the organization" rather than public diplomacy aimed abroad. As he explained, wikis often seemed particularly natural platforms for his agency's employees, because "there is a strong culture of editing in the State Department."

One of the most daring projects he discussed was "The Sounding Board," which serves as an "ideation tool" to encourage professional diplomats to make personal suggestions as individuals with first and last names who are assumed to be equal. The submissions come in unweighted without regard to job title, and then these suggestions can be voted either up or down by other participants. In this way Boly explained how an article on military training in Diplopedia emerged from a request for more formal training in military norms.

It is worth noting that Boly used the Prezi presentation tool. As a sign of his interest in software alternatives, it was a particularly significant choice, given that few at the conference chose any PowerPoint alternatives. For other examples of this particular form of digital rhetoric that I have observed on the conference circuit, see postings here and here.

He closed with a discussion on his department's efforts to "crowdsource" after the Haiti earthquake using SMS messaging and geolocation data with an Ushahidi program based in Tufts University.

I've Got a Lot of Plain Friends

Yesterday Jackie Marsh of the University of Sheffield gave a talk about "Digital literacy and play in MMOs/Virtual Worlds for children." She described children who generally had about two hours a day of media use in which family may "scaffold children's emergent digital literacy," but children also show "growing independence" and are even able to map their own literacy practices for researchers. She noted that other researchers, notably Sonia Livingstone, have demonstrated that children may move from one media platform to another as computational media become more popular in patterns of displacement rather than aggregation of hours spent. Marsh showed a broad continuum of digital media behaviors engaged in by young children, who may be pretending to text in pre-school, from "playing" to "controlling," although many forms of behavior are not ones of "productive and analytic media use." She also criticized the notion of the "digital native" and asserted that research had shown that "access and use was not just about class" because birth order and more complex forms of socioeconomic interaction could play a role.

Marsh's research focused on Club Penguin and BarbieGirls, although she noted that "children are always aspirational" and may quickly outgrow sites perceived as juvenile in favor of more adult virtual worlds like Habbo Hotel or migrate to ones that are seen as more trendy like Moshi Monsters. She defined basic characteristics of these virtual worlds, which included a "customizable avatar," a "home for the avatar," a "persistent space," an "in-world currency," and -- in the case of such kids' sites -- "chat," "moderators," and "link to an offline world of toys and texts." She cited the 2009 work of Maaike Lauwaert about the "geography of play" and the link between online and offline friendship. She explained how many of the sites rely on user policing of behavior, which she described as "cheap," because in playground play kids are eager to report on each other.

In discussing Club Penguin, she talked about various forms of capital, which have been enumerated by Pierre Bourdieu, which she demonstrated by contrasting the split-level igloo of a paid member of Club Penguin with the iglo of a participant limited to free services. She also discussed the "logographic capability" of children who recognize icons, although they also engage in more sophisticated literacy practices involving postcards, books, and newspapers.

These themes continued in her discussion of BarbieGirls, although she said this world -- which was in pink rather than primary colors -- had no even tokenistic mentions of boys as potential members. She showed the "butchest you can get your avatar to look" and noted the lack of choice in skin color and the fact that you might be frequently reminded that you are not a member during play. She also expressed her bemusement at the "heteronormative" character of "my crush" or fortune-telling forms of interaction that seemed strange to her as a "fifty-one year old lesbian." In this world she said, "children and parents are co-constructed as consumers," and companies like the Mattel empire make their pitch to parents by marketing their anti-predator credentials and their trustworthiness as a "safe" brand.

Marsh explained that she had conducted a small study in comparison with the giant Whyville study, which included 175 children from the ages of 5 to 11 who were surveyed, 26 interviewed, and 3 eleven-year-olds who were filmed. Shopping and consumerism were big themes for girls, while boys were concerned with games, but she said that some children did have critical thinking about the constraints of virtual worlds. In one example, a child complained about not being able to wear a wig and tiara separately, and another expressed distress that virtual pets could run away so easily. Many children found workarounds both playing solo and with siblings, relatives, and classmates. In thinking about playground rhymes and games and the potential for a more comprehensive study of play practice, Marsh observed that it still was not clear how virtual parties and other social rituals online functioned: if they only thickened existing social ties or invited children who would not be otherwise included into play.

One of her informants, Sally, age 11, explained that it wasn't all about "clothes, hair, and posh houses," since "I've got a lot of plain friends." Marsh described may genres of play, which included fantasy play, games with rules, rough and tumble play, and social drama play. She also described their delight in transgressive discussions of discos and getting drunk or throwing mudballs at security cameras. She cited the work of VP friend Tom Boellstorff (on disinhibition) and online friend Constance Steinkuehler (on rituals and performances) for related findings about the pleasures of doing bad online.

Nameless No More

Speaking of reader comments, which were the subject of the last posting, it is interesting to note the findings of this New York Times story about how "News Sites Rethink Anonymous Online Comments."

What is interesting to see is that the paper's rhetoric connects this policy decision to the so-called "end of privacy" argument at the end of the story.

If commenters were asked to provide their real names for display online, some would no doubt give false identities, and verifying them would be too labor-intensive to be realistic. But news executives say that merely making the demand for a name and an e-mail address would weed out much of the most offensive commentary.

Several industry executives cited a more fundamental force working in favor of identifying commenters. Through blogging and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, millions of people have grown accustomed to posting their opinions — to say nothing of personal details — with their names attached, for all to see. Adapting the Facebook model, some news sites allow readers to post a picture along with a comment, another step away from anonymity.

"There is a younger generation that doesn’t feel the same need for privacy," Ms. Huffington said. "Many people, when you give them other choices, they choose not to be anonymous."

"Ethics Has Become What You Can't Do"

This line from the AoIR "Ethics" panel moderator Elizabeth Buchanan expressed the frustration of many Internet researchers with the human subjects protocols that are mandated by university Institutional Review Boards, which tend to be designed for biomedical investigations rather than scholarship that engages with questions of self-representation and the liminal areas between public and private discursive realms. I've heard many talks in which speakers merely complain about their campus's IRB processes without much critical reflection, so I was pleased to see that the line-up at AoIR was engaging in a much more substantive and theoretically sophisticated discussion about what should be best practices.

Of course, there was some justifiable venting. Edward Lee Lamoureaux complained that his research in Second Life was frequently stymied, even though his study of religion in virtual worlds often concerns the rhetoric of display and involves participants who blog about their activities and express far less sensitivity than he does to the fact the SL isn't entirely a public space. In particular he bemoaned the fact that the "confidentiality" standard rather than one of "minimal risk" was expected by IRBs, who can't understand the self-publicizing nature of the Internet in which social actors may use multiple digital media platforms for communications with varying degrees of assumed openness. In his Prezi presentation he bemoaned the dominance of the "common rule" for research methods, which privileges the medical model and its biopolitics. The discussion of his presentation also raised interesting questions about the difference between studying digital objects and avatars.

Next Michael Zimmer presented a remarkable paper on the "Tastes, Ties, and Time" study of an entire college cohort's use of Facebook, which was sanctioned by the social network site itself, and attacked the fiction of unidentifiable information in the era of data aggregation. Using this study, which he could easily figure out was conducted at the supposedly anonymous Harvard campus, based on the size of the freshman class and their offerings for undergraduate majors, he argued that protocols are far too frequently designed "for protecting researchers not research subjects." Although he granted that the Harvard study presented important scholarship about the relationship between physical and network analysis and was also obliged to release data under the terms of their NSF funding, he claimed that this "new way of doing social science" also unfairly took advantage of "insider access" granted to Harvard graduate students who were also on the Facebook network of the university. Of course, since I'm a member of the Harvard Facebook network as well and a person who remembers a "facebook" as a print publication. In closing Zimmer also reminded the audience about the resources at InternetResearchEthics.org and credited Buchanan and Charles Ess for improving the practices of the field.

Dylan Wittkower, who is editing a new collection on Facebook and Philosophy that includes essays from Ian Bogost and myself, was the final presenter in the panel. (You can also check out his free philosophy podcasts, where he donates his time as a reader.) Like Lamoureaux, he was experimenting with software presentation alternatives to PowerPoint. In his case he used FreeMind's mind mapping software. Since we are teaching Aristotle's Ethics in the Humanities Core Course this year, and I co-authored the writing assignment about the nature of friendship in Aristotle's text, I was very interested in Wittkower's thesis that friendships of use or pleasure could become friendships of virtue as Facebook members are exposed to signifiers of civility and tolerance when unintentially exposed to albums with gay families or gay weddings.

Why Face is Hard to Understand

In choosing to title an item about avatars in Newsweek magazine "Our Imaginary, Hotter Selves," it's clear that mainstream media reporting still clumsily bungles describing one of the basic features of online experience, the importance of "face" in its broader sense the ways that it goes far beyond one's physical apparearance in digital culture. Although the article cited research by Stanford's Jeremy Bailenson and Nick Yee about the "Proteus effect' in which changing one's avatar's morphology has an effect on real-life self-esteem and consequently presents possible therapeutic uses to those with emotional disorders, the article also contains generalizations about how "Western society sees taller people as more competent and having greater leadership potential than shorter people" that indicate a failure to understand how nuanced interactions on the Internet may be and the large number of operative clues at work.

Here's my thesis: we're in denial about the importance of face in American culture and about the role that ideas about character, prestige, and self-image play in our everyday interactions with each other. Based on my own experiences, both online and offline, I don't accept the idea that face is a concept that only defines cultures other than our own and only dictates the behavior of people in far-off places like China and Iraq. I'm tired of stereotypes that we are an “identity” culture, while others are “face” cultures and that our moral system is driven by “guilt,” while others are driven by shame. How many times are we told that Americans only value the “individual" and devalue the "collective"?

And yet our insatiable diet for etiquette manuals, books about negotiation, self-help bibles, and dating handbooks indicates that we seem to be repressing our national obsession with face. We care about being chosen as mates, friends, colleagues, and team members and understand those acts of inclusion and ranking as dependent on factors that are intangible and not related to measurable personal assets.

This is part of why I am so interested in research on politeness and communicating norms in online environments such as games and social network sites. For example, in Second Life, the main question isn't really "is my avatar as attractive as it should be?" but "does my avatar show that I'm not a n00b and know how to customize my appearance?" The latter has more to do with what I'm describing as "face."

Thick Skinned

In the United States, stories about cyberbullies often focus on interactions between minors who are assumed to lack the emotional defenses and social skills to ward of hateful comments, but in Korea, as the Los Angeles Times explains in Suicide of South Korean actress fuels Internet debate, lawmakers also look at the consequences of griefing and flaming for adult Internet users. Apparently legislators are considering punishments for cyber-insults after the death of a celebrity in response to rumors about her role in another possible suicide.

Choi's suicide came at a time when government officials are pushing to introduce new clauses in communication laws to enforce harsher punishment for cyber-insults. The country is also preparing to extend an existing law that requires Web service providers to confirm social security numbers and the real names of users.

However, as the article also points out, the cyber-insult law could be easily used against those who criticize the government, in a country with a history of decades of political repression in the recent past.

The Harlot's Redemption

Jonathan Alexander points out the launch of a new online journal Harlot, which also uses blogs and wikis to further the rhetorical analysis of pop culture, grassroots politics, and the "endless streams of subtly persuasive communication that surround us every day." Alexander contributes "phonesex: a digital collage" and "dis|orientation : a straight closet" as indicators of the roles that ubiquitous communication devices and Craigslist ads play in contemporary sexuality and its self-representations and adscapes. If I have a criticism of Harlot, it is of its seeming failure to engage with the truly mundane, at least in its first issue. Unsexy objects of rhetorical study deserve attention as well, such as e-mail or the architecture of post offices, because it is often most important to understand the rhetorics that have been made most invisible in order to grapple with fundamental questions about ideology and the cultural imaginaries that we accept uncritically.

A Language is a Dialect with an Army

Colette Daiute of City University of New York has spent a lot of time in computer labs in community centers in the former Yugoslavia. Today, in a presentation on the U.C. Irvine campus about "Literacy Development and Crisis," Daiute discussed her four-nation study of what were generally computer-mediated narratives in an online survey that asked 137 young people to write stories about conflict involving their own interactions with peers, disagreements between adults they have witnessed, or an imagined disruption in a local narrative set in the future in the context of civic participation around a community center.

In a talk that is useful for thinking about a lot of Virtualpolitik topics (public diplomacy, political rhetoric, language ideology, and computer-mediated communication, for starters), Daiute argued that too much attention has focused on medical models for the survivors of trauma that target treating only the individual and seeing experiences of war and urban strife as damage which the external practitioner must heal. Daiute's work looks at how narratives of nations, leaders, and groups can be used to justify aggression or peace and the "scripts and stories" of their younger citizens in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In addition to drawing on research from political scientists, Daiute referenced Vygotsky's work as a developmentalist, which has been so influential in write-to-learn pedagogies like my own, and Bakhtin's theories of genre and addressivity. She also notes that much of the postwar infrastructure has been built around computers in these newly independent republics and that online communication allows adolescents to read and discuss a "public story," such as use of an offensive alternate reality game, "Catch the Illegal Immigrant," at NYU.

Thanks to Mark Warschauer for providing the title for this posting during the Q&A and to Rebecca Black for inviting me.

Sense and Sensibility

The conference was starting to wind down by the time Jeffrey Bardzell gave his talk on "Developing a 'sensibility for the particular'" yesterday. Because Bardzell is very comfortable in the chats-with-stats genres that I associate with scholarship from the social study of science or human-computer interaction, I was surprised to find out from his faculty web page that his PhD was actually in comparative literature. Thus, although he did have the obligatory "methods" section, he was able to make a larger argument about how the scale of participatory culture makes truly representational sampling impossible and how researchers need to have "a capacity for critical judgment" that goes beyond number crunching. For example, Bardzell asked when 65,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube every day, what would a representative sample of YouTube videos even mean. Internet subcultures thrive on micro-jokes, secret languages, and frequent disbanding behaviors, so statistical approaches may not be all that viable, Bardzell argues.

To ground his approach Bardzell uses the research of Löwgren and Stolterman in the domain of professional designers. According to Bardzell, these authors of Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology examine categories like "retrospective reflection," "reflective thinking," "a developed language," and "a sense of quality" in ways that can be used to understand individualized intentions in digital media practices, which he reads against Bourdieu's concept of the "habitus" or system of dispositions. Thus both digital designers and digital researchers must align their sensibilities to their communities through concrete engagement.

Bardzell's actual survey of four open-ended questions about researchers' research methods for understanding participatory culture is still available on the web here. But in his talk he presented some of his initial results that showed how Internet researchers find interesting examples. Respondents commented about entertainment value, novelty, and utility, with "WTF" being a common response that ultimately suggests further study. As one researcher admits, "I stumble on just about everything initially." Often the most important "community metric" is the urge to forward a link to others, and the mainstream media and commercial search engines were discounted as sources of information. Given some of the stories that have appeared in the press since I started this blog two and a half years ago, I understand Bardzell's attitude toward increasingly conglomerated news sources all too well.

In closing Bardzell looked at the question "Who is allowed to speak?" and the ways that academics make compromises to address specialized audiences, particularly peer-reviewers expecting formal analysis. Rather than serve as traditional academic historians, many Internet researchers must be active participants in Internet subcultures, because they depend on their social networks and the daily practices associated with them to provide fresh material for their scholarship.

In the session that followed, Bardzell presented the research of his wife Shaowen Bardzell. Coming into the room, I was actually lukewarm toward her scholarship, based on having heard her present her work once before, which was on sadomasochistic sexual communities in Second Life. I must say I was pleasantly surprised by both the more original and the more academically useful turn her that her research on virtual worlds has taken of late. She is now examining how the designer is embodied in Second Life in ways very different from being parked in front of a Maya work station. In the "Sandbox" areas of Second Life she observed many different types of novice and intermediate designers at work, including a user making a couch and then bringing her house into the sandbox to check its dimensions and another designer building a fighter jet with virtual graph paper below. As she pointed out, there were griefers there as well as researchers, although her research indicated that their interventions and bombardments could also be understood as part of the sandbox creative process in which digital designers move not only between Photoshop and the scripting tools of SL, but also in the virtual space of observation and interaction.

More Mixed Messages

This video on YouTube, White Chicks and Gang Signs, mocks the foolish cachet of imitating gang behavior among the social media used by affluent young females. It is not clear if the photos in the video come from photo-sharing or social networking websites, but these are clearly signs flashed online rather than on the street. Some interesting commentary about it and the stereotypes it perpetuates on Racialicious.

On Exhibitionism

Recently, I was looking at the Facebook page for a friend's movie about eating disorders and found myself bothered by the kinds of exhibitionistic body-consciousness on display among those who identified with the protagonists in the film. If they didn't look like bland blonde beauty queens, many of the 97 members of the group posted pictures of themselves ostentatiously eating junk food or ghoulishly vamping for the camera in ways that showed off their skeletal frames. I'd consider THIN a feminist film, broadly speaking, but I suppose that Lauren Greenfield's bleak portrait of the lives of anorexics and bulimics, which features cinematography from fellow VP friend Amanda Micheli, can also be seen as unintentionally reinforcing patriarchal norms because it still objectifies the bodies of women.

Then, today, in The Los Angeles Times, the opinion page ran an essay about "The false modesty movement," which criticized how conservative websites and marketers were urging young women to remove themselves from the public sphere. At the same time these modesty advocates were not insisting that the same caution be exercised by young men who were encouraged to be "dangerous" and embrace "manliness."

After reading this editorial, I visited some of the websites that the author mentioned. The Catholic Church's Pure fashion, which is devoted to "guiding young women ages 14 to 18 to become confident, competent leaders who live the virtues of modesty and purity in their schools and communities," promises that graduates of its "eight month Model Training Program" will attain mastery of "public speaking" and "hair and make up artistry," which are presented as equally weighted capabilities. I'm a rhetorician, but I don't think beauty queen speeches count. Furthermore, they entirely ignore how teens must present themselves publicly through digital networks and caution against "solicitations of certain media that go too far in the exhibition of intimate things."

When I visited the "DM Community" message boards of DressModestly.com, which was also mentioned in the modesty movement editorial, I was amused to see that their signature "Jewel Top" had generated complaints from customers about the fact that its design revealed undergarments. The system administrators ask that customers tell them "about your success stories, as well as any problems you have had," but their user-generated content comes with carefully articulated rules about decorum: "Do not be vulgar or mean, but honest and open." Consequently, with such a coercively modest audience, there appears to be very little posting on the message boards.

Of course, in the case of my own children, my main anxiety about their public exposure through the message channels of online communities is that they both are abysmal spellers. And I don't want their peers or people in authority who might view their pages to think less of them as a result. Although I have boys, I like to think that if I had daughters I would still be more worried about their production of competent prose (preferably with correct orthography) than about potential "immodesty" in their presentation of their electronic personal images to the public.

Nonetheless, I suspect that the exhibitionism of many practices in digital culture is one of the factors that makes otherwise thinking parents pause when it comes to letting their children develop online lives without hovering supervision. As I've argued before, I think "stranger danger" is a false issue and that it represents a kind of projection of parental fears to external sources. When it comes to parenting, it's often not what others might do to your child that makes parents with kids of a certain age anxious, but the conduct of the children themselves in cyberspace or anywhere else. And thus exhibitionism might be a substantive issue while predator panic is probably a dodge.

As a parent myself, I have to deal with the difficult task of teaching children meaningful Internet values without the hypocrisy of relegating them to an entirely separate child-safe sphere. This quest has produced a few other occasional short essays in the "On Values" series, such as "On Transgression" or "On Dissimulation." As in the case of the other two essays, I'm going to argue that there is a positive value for the title subject, and in this case that teen exhibitionism isn't all bad and that the Internet is a logical site of its expression.

Naturally, whenever I hear other parents moan and gossip about the things they've spied near their children's online profiles, I wonder why they assume that exhibitionism wouldn't be possible without distributed electronic networks.

"Have you ever heard of print?" I feel like asking them some time.

Certainly, as a young person, I spent a lot of time trying to get attention through various publishing ventures involving ink and paper. In high school, these efforts produced both "literary" and "humor" self-published or collectively published periodicals, which required only a xerox machine and some editorial skill to deliver. As someone terrible at sports and lacking in the social graces, showing off in print allowed me to acquire cultural capital that I would otherwise never have had the opportunity to garner using other means. I would guess that the zines of the Riot Grrrl movement served a similar purpose for some of my younger friends, although these had the built-in advantages of a recognizable genre and a trans-community audience.

In college, I wrote for both The Harvard Advocate and The Harvard Lampoon. The former seemed to discourage an exhibitionistic ethos, even though a number of confessional poets began their careers there, while the latter celebrated it and often illustrated stories with photographs of Lampy's writing staff. As the exuberant picture below shows, in which I appear between a present-day best-selling author and a late night talk show host, exhibitionism in this print publication represented a successful social strategy, in which both men and women could participate. (Click to enlarge.)

That's not to say that these displays in print were always gender neutral. When I look at pages like the one below, in which I appear in my nightie in a tasteless item that I wrote about necrophilia (and which -- in fact -- caused the magazine to lose several of its advertisers), I don't recognize many of the features of the public persona that I maintain today. Indeed, if anything, college print publications have gotten worse in this particular area. Witness the sleazy Harvard H-Bomb as an example. Ironically, given fears about the Internet and exhibitionism, part of its cachet was that its titilating pictures and stories existed only on glossy traditional pages rather than seemingly more ephemeral bits on a URL.

So what's the alternative to "modesty" if a teen is supposed to avoid excessively individualistic exhibitionism? Perhaps it's the anonymous manufacture of code, texts, or artifacts as part of a collective endeavor. But unless we expect young people to spend their time selflessly tinkering with open source or editing Wikipedia entries without recognition, the times may have passed this anti-exhibitionistic lifestyle by. In other words, from a broader historical perspective, tell-all or show-all exhibitionism has a long history, and in many ways it is a phenomenon of the Enlightenment, from which many of our current ideas about information culture come.

In Hackers & Painters, former Yahoo executive Paul Graham opines that it is the absence of an apprenticeship system in the modern era that causes the lives of teenagers to be stripped of the economic and cultural value that they would have had as craftsmen in guilds. Without a system that integrates their labor into the real world of adult sociality, Graham argues, students in middle school and high school can only exist in a virtual reality environment based on the cult of popularity in which students who actually make things are shunned as nerds.

I'm not sure Graham is right that young people should be embracing the hacker ethic rather than the YouTube fifteen minutes of fame, although there is certainly a big difference between a failure like Aleksey Vayner and an obvious success like James Kotecki. The skills of teens and twenty-somethings at digital rhetoric will be extremely important for their future job prospects and to their abilities to participate in social networks, and cognizance of certain aspects of public performance will only enhance their opportunities.

On Dissimulation

I'm not sure that honesty is always the best policy when it comes to giving advice about online behavior. Many social critics complain about teens lying about their ages, but like transgression, there can be positive social value to dissimulation. Why give your correct age to marketers, when accurate personal information has become a commodity with quantifiable value to rapacious others?

When it comes to good digital parenting, I think teaching your children to misrepresent their online identities can be important. For example, I list my birthdate as 1910 in all my online profiles. Thus, I only receive a very few targeted solicitations, and the ones that I do get are pretty amusing, given a hale and hearty lifestyle.

As I've argued elsewhere, misrepresenting your identity isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the past, I've certainly done it in print with my own college yearbook entry, and I don't consider it a moral failing on my part. (Of course, misrepresenting myself on my c.v. would be quite another matter.)

Teaching your children to have a sense of humor is a life-long survival skill, and parody and hoaxes have a legitimate function as social critiques. Fellow copyright critic and university academic Kembrew McLeod even lists his "pranks" on the navigation of his home page.

One anecdote from the pre-digital era: I consider myself a good civic-minded American, but I've never been particularly patriotic. Of course, after the whole "Freedom Fries" hysteria, I surrounded myself with French national symbols, but that's probably as close as I've come to any genuine sentiments about any flag.

But when I married designer and animator Mel Horan during the presidential administration of the senior Bush, we thought it would be funny to dress up as political conservatives and pose in front of a U.S. flag with earnest expressions. Friends who knew us got the joke, but family members were probably somewhat mystified.

We wanted it to be subtle enough that newspapers would actually run the pictures, which they did, so we were grateful when now eminent photographer Miles Coolidge agreed to do it. (Click the proof sheet to enlarge.)

I hope that one day my own children commemorate life events so memorably. Creating their own mythology with some well-placed fictions is certainly one way to do it.


(For more on the brand identity of national flags, see this website.)

Your Karma Just Ran Over My Dogma

Ideas about how reciprocity and reciprocality function on the Internet are important for any theory of online community. For example, some -- such as Ellen Strenski and Erika Pearson -- take an anthropological view and have posited a gift-exchange model in which users participate in a circuit of social obligations based on the transfer of digital objects. Others take a dim view that denies any egalitarian symbiosis in relationships created and maintained within online communities, even if pyramid schemes give enough rewards to encourage continued participation, as the current fad for zombie applications for social networking sites may indicate.

In this posting, I'd like to take a quick look at the concept of Internet "karma" as a reward system that provides incentives for pro-social behavior.

For many years, Slashdot has offered its contributors "karma" to serve as "a reference that primarily represents how your comments have been moderated in the past." Although Slashdot has been a longtime Internet institution, its supporters have explained in their FAQ that the terms for earning karma have somewhat changed over time. In other words, Slashdot karma used to be a number, but is now a named state with "Terrible, Bad, Neutral, Positive, Good, and Excellent" as the only possible designations. As Slashdot explains the rationale for moving away from a numeric score, "People like to treat their Slashdot Karma like some sort of video game, with a numeric integer representing their score in the game. People who do this simply are missing the point. The text label is one way we've decided to emphasize the point that karma doesn't matter."

According to their FAQ, Reddit also offers editors karma if they post popular links in order to encourage increasing the quality and quantity of their submissions. Some have suggested that Wikipedia also adopt the karma model to improve editorial reliability. In all these senses, "karma" is another scheme for indexing one's Internet reputation and would thus be very different from actual Buddhist karma, as this podcast explains.

Some nonprofits who do online social marketing have attempted to associate the term with a more traditional meaning of net ethical value earned through disinterested charity. Last month, I received an e-mail encouraging me to play Karma Tycoon, which opened with a quotation from Martin Luther King Jr. and labeled "Good News of the Day." It read as follows:

A New York-based nonprofit is hoping to strike a philanthropic spark with Karma Tycoon, a new online game for teenagers and a creation of the non-profit DoSomething.org. The idea was to put a twist on popular video games in which players try to maximize profit in order to amass wealth. "Why not create a game that maximizes karma in order to make the world a better place?" asks Aria Finger of Do Something. Karma Tycoon was officially launched on Dec. 21, 2006. Players who register at the site can pick the type of nonprofit they would like to administer, such as an animal shelter or a homeless shelter, helping them generate an interest in social entrepreneurship as well as teaching fiscal responsibility. According to Finger, the early response has been very positive and version 2.0 is on its way.

Ironically, their pitch aims its incentives at precisely the videogame ethos that Slashdot is now disavowing. Furthermore, I'm certainly not someone with a short attention span, but I tried to play the game several times and found it very difficult to become engaged with the game play. Although it uses Google Earth-style graphics, it doesn't do much with either "big data" or information design that could make a game about humanitarianism one with some aesthetic pleasure. Largely, its a game about accounting, where you must balance expenses while opening new facilities. The player must do this by applying for grants and ensuring a revenue stream. Perhaps the multi-player version is more fun, but I found my opportunities for creative input in the single-player version to be limited to naming centers for my philanthropic empire.

The branding of karma is also being employed by Amnesty International, which is sponsoring the Instant Karma campaign to save Darfur by encouraging visitors to sign an online petition and then buy an album of digital music sponsored by John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono to help their humanitarian fund-raising. The tunes are actually okay, in the universe of charity albums, but I still didn't buy the Instant Karma tracks.

The Wee Generation

This week I visited WeeWorld, an online make-your-own-avatar community that seems to be targeted at female tweens, much like the more explicitly educationally oriented Whyville. In fact, just today, The Independent included WeeWorld in its list of potentially subversive sites that "are getting girls as young as six hooked on social networking." As someone who considers herself a relatively responsible digital parent, I must say I'm tired of the rhetoric of the mainstream media that continues to use the language of addiction to characterize social networking sites. In the interest of full disclosure, I should also say that the CEO of WeeWorld is Celia Francis, pictured above, who at one time was my next-door neighbor in the Harvard dorms and is now a Facebook friend.

WeeWorld has two obvious advantages over Whyville: 1) It is designed for a fluid user experience in connecting to pre-existing social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook and 2) Your avatar appearance immediately presents a more polished, organic whole, which might also reflect a particularly popular contemporary Internet aesthetic that I would argue is also seen in the Nintendo Mii application for the Wii game system. Visitors to WeeWorld can play games as their avatars, such as their simplified version of Dance Dance Revolution as a non-exergame, Disco Fever.

WeeWorld certainly appeals to the same part of the Zeitgeist for modular makeovers with an aesthetic that is simultaneously cartoonish and faithfully representational. As someone who follows intellectual property issues, I was interested to learn about the company's copyright battle with Nintendo, which Francis explains from her company's perspective here.

(For those who missed it, the Mii craze swept blogs and YouTube videos a little while ago. Homages to fan culture were particularly popular, with armies of mini-Mii s assembled from copies of reality TV-type celebrities minted from shows like American Idol and Lost. There are several Mii-making tutorials now available online, like this Mii How-To Guide, just as there are tons of online videos with stages of Photoshop retouching, like "playboy evolution made by photoshop" or the "Photoshopped to kill" video from Argentina.)

Although I liked the fact that I could inhabit WeeWorld as a bearded lady dressed only in fig leaves, I still must admit that I found WeeWorld a little constraining, even if as Francis points out there are more potential avatar permutations available than there are people on the planet. Michele White has argued in The Body and the Screen that when more user-generated content is permitted in avatar creation, there are also more interesting conflicts possible over property, ownership, artistic license, and the social contract itself. Even if WeeWorld attempts to respond to current events with items like their possibly crass virtual Virginia Tech t-shirt, it's not really participatory culture at the level of digital design. Of course, some people prefer having a more limited number of choices in creating their virtual character and more instructions for facilitating social networking. Nonetheless, I thought that there were more kinds of emergent behavior possible in Whyville than there were in WeeWorld, as the strange commerce in avatar face parts in Whyville shows.


Despite some androgynous models, there were certainly forms of gender regulation in play. After an odd experience with the "belly" feature, which only allows for skeletal and beer belly extremes, I was reminded of the observations of One Jewish Dyke about her issues with "plus-sized" Yahoo avatars. It felt like the ideology of marketers was still shaping the online discourse.

In contrast, Whyville feels much more like a true virtual world in which strangers might either go by on the street or offer themselves for orientation services. Even if WeeWorld supports chat features in Skype and IM, it still lacks what Alison McMahan calls "perceptual realism" and "social realism." For me, the in-your-face existence of strangers is an important and under-written-about component of virtual worlds that gets at how people regulate behavior when they must interact with people who aren't part of any kinship structure. I would also claim that it is a critical part of ultimately creating legal, social, and political realities there. Even if, in places like Second Life, it creates interactive awkwardness while parties figure out the rules for social and physical interaction, as this YouTube video satirizes.

The Wrong Side of the Tracks in Cyberspace

Of course, the big news in social networking research this month is danah boyd's study on class divisions and how the Facebook/MySpace split is manifested in a number of social phenomena. In "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace," boyd argues that the "predator panic" pushed by the mainstream media also brought the message about class aspirations and digital community home. These divisions even persist into adulthood and professions like the military, in which enlisted men are in MySpace, while officers are on Facebook.

In boyd's schema, the two subcultures divide as follows:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

In order to demarcate these two groups, let's call the first group of teens "hegemonic teens" and the second group "subaltern teens."

The research seems valid to me intuitively, based on what I've seen on both sites poking around with loaded terms like "Support Our Troops."

Nonetheless, I'm the college-educated parent of a popular football-playing fourteen-year-old on an honors preparatory track. And my kid is on MySpace. Still, I can't blame him for having no interest at all in what he sees as my boorish cocktail party of oldsters on Facebook.

Then again, I've also never been terribly concerned about people misrepresenting themselves in online social networking sites. I've included my own deceptive Harvard Facebook picture from the days of print at the top of this posting and my college yearbook entry chocked full of fictitious information at the bottom. "Ad Hoc Society"? "Justice League"? In addition to using kitschy retro imagery, the class identity and cultural membership that I was representing back then -- so desirable to many present-day Facebook members -- was largely a private joke with those who personally knew me.

Big Love

This is Alice Robison. She teaches at M.I.T.

I have never met her, although we've apparently given talks at some of the same conferences.

However, when it comes to defining kinship in a given online community, it would seem that Alice is my closest genetic match in the Facebook family tree. Right now, I share over a third of my digital social DNA with Alice, because we have 22 Facebook friends in common. That's far more online mutual friends than I share with anyone else -- far more than those on Facebook with whom I have worked, blogged, talked, taught, commuted, or sat alongside in church, college, or graduate school.

Perhaps it proves yet again Mark Granovetter's point about "The Strength of Weak Ties." On paper, Alice and I actually have a lot in common in our professional lives: similar backgrounds in running college writing programs, teaching with technology, and studying the practices and ideologies associated with videogame design. Or maybe it demonstrates what Albert-László Barabási argues in Linked, that particular individuals function as social hubs by virtue of the large number of weak social ties that they are able to maintain. She's also joined a number of Facebook groups, including my personal favorite Researchers Researching Researchers, which mocks the endlessly recursive character of the digital participant observer. In any case, it seems that if I'd need a virtual organ transplant, Alice is the one to whom I should go.

Your Vote Counts

The world is voting this month, not for U.N. Secretary-General, but for candidates in a race that could bring tourist dollars to their nations. Yesterday I was at a reception for friend Flavia Monteiro, a Brazilian artist, and the conversation turned to New 7 Wonders Internet voting. In this global publicity stunt, a new list of the Seven Wonders of the World would be announced on 7/7/07.

What was extraordinary was that people at the party were taking their decision as Internet voters remarkably seriously. Brazilian loyalists, who had seen the civic importance of preparations for the Pan-American games, didn't want to miss their opportunity to vote for the statue of Christ the Redeemer that looms over Rio de Janeiro. Transnational guests, who had allegiances to more than one country, France and Turkey in one case, might favor Hagia Sofia instead, especially if these voters were secularized and wanted to see it maintain its status as a museum rather than revert to being a mosque.

The site also has a social media dimension. At MyWonder, visitors can share digital images and video files of their chosen landmark. Although the site as a whole has a strong retail identity, it also claims to have an educational dimension. At the kids page are "classroom tools" and "school projects."

Talk to Me People

June is Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, and William Sledd's Ask A Gay Man's Show Your Pride video on YouTube has already garnered tens of thousands of views and at least 87 video responses, many from young people talking about coming out to their families and to America on YouTube, as these two teens did. Like other video weblogs, often these online videos are shot in bedrooms with beds in the backgrounds, upon which at least one respondent jumped up and down for joy. So far comments have been remarkably restrained despite the status of Sledd's video on YouTube's most watched list. Sledd himself has been leaving appreciative notes on his supporters' videos, in which he presents himself as a kind of ideal reader who describes reactions to their content like "nearly in tears" and "super cute" and "omg this is so funny! i watched it like 6 times!" in encouragement. Remixes haven't appeared yet, but there are some comments that use Sledd's footage and provide their own voice-overs.

As a venue for recording street violence and police brutality, YouTube is also recording how gay pride parades around the world, like this one in Moscow, have been attacked by thugs from hate groups.

Update: Now there are a slew of homophobic and abusive comments underneath Sledd's video, so perhaps I spoke too soon.

The Assault on Web 2.0

As today's The Washington Post covers how "Blogs Chronicle War from Soldiers' Perspectives," there is bad news out about how Defense Department regulations are curtailing the online speech of military bloggers. The same day Wired reports that the "Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death" and publishes the Pentagon's new rules, which include prohibitions on uncleared e-mail.

This blog has been reporting about how the military has attempted to control the informational practices of its soldiers and determine how they constitute online communities. Some of this is obviously part of a policy of message control, when regrettable user-generated content like these Iraqi boys running for a water bottle reaches the public. I would argue that it is part of a larger cultural clash in which the culture of knowledge (represented by institutions like the military) is threatened by an emerging culture of distributed information. National Public Radio reported on the military's YouTube channel this afternoon in "U.S. Military Uses YouTube to Get Its Story Out." Apparently the current multimedia offerings feature a kidnapped man being returned to his family and soldiers blowing up soccer balls for youngsters. See the Virtualpolitik take on the site's launch here.

It's Getting Blogswarm in Here

You can read a range of responses to today's "Take Back the Blog" invitation to combat online misogyny here.