About Time

The selection of the TIME Person of the Year always marks an interesting cultural moment. In my 2006 summary of the year in digital rhetoric I opened my annual video with the TIME cover with the mirrored page that announced that the person of the year was "You." The subtitle explained that Web 2.0 was to be a new era of second-person culture: "Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world."

This year the TIME cover offers not a reflection of the reader's face but a youthful blue-eyed visage with freckles, stubble, with shine under his eyes. The 2006 cover made some sense in light of the 2006 elections in which social media shaped results in both the House and the Senate. In 2010 the only newsworthy event tied to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is the debut of the film The Social Network. One might argue that this is really a story about cinema not the World Wide Web, as a particular film gears up for the Oscar race.

Indeed, much of the article about Zuckerberg that serves as the cover story for the TIME issue
is devoted to differences between fact and fiction in relationship to the David Fincher film. Apparently Zuckerberg is warm and well-liked, didn't have to struggle to get the girl of his dreams, and never drank appletinis.

The reality is that Zuckerberg isn't alienated, and he isn't a loner. He's the opposite. He's spent his whole life in tight, supportive, intensely connected social environments: first in the bosom of the Zuckerberg family, then in the dorms at Harvard and now at Facebook, where his best friends are his staff, there are no offices and work is awesome. Zuckerberg loves being around people. He didn't build Facebook so he could have a social life like the rest of us. He built it because he wanted the rest of us to have his.

The claim for Zuckerberg's historical significance has to do with TIME book reviewer Lev Grossman's argument that Zuckerberg is undoing the nineteen-sixties and the Internet that it created. (Some familiar with the marketing of print books may remember that Grossman's book The Magicians was hawked by its publisher with a free stand-alone first chapter.)

Facebook is the realization of a dream. but it's also the death of a dream, one that began in the late 1960s. That's when the architecture of the Internet was first laid out, and it's a period piece. The Internet is designed the way it is to accommodate any number of practical considerations, but it's also an expression of 1960s counterculture. No single computer runs the network. No one is in charge. It's a paradise of equality and anonymity, an electronic commune.

In the 1970s the communes faded away, but the Internet only grew, and that countercultural attitude lingered. The presiding myth of the Internet through the 1980s and 1990s was that when you went online, you could shed your earthly baggage and be whoever you wanted. Your age, your gender, your race, your job, your marriage, where you lived, where you went to school — all that fell away. In effect, the social experiments of the 1960s were restaged online. Log on, tune in, drop out.

We all know how that ended. When the Web arrived in the early 1990s, it went mainstream. The number of people on the Internet exploded, from 2.6 million in 1990 to 385 million in 2000, and we messed up the scene. The equality and anonymity that made the Internet so liberating in its early days turned out to be disastrously disinhibiting. They made the Internet a haven for pornographers and hatemongers and a free-for-all for scammers, hackers and virus writers.
. . .
It grew because it gave people something they wanted. All that stuff that the Internet enabled you to leave behind, all the trappings of ordinary bourgeois existence — your job, your family, your background? On Facebook, you take it with you. It's who you are.

Zuckerberg has retrofitted the Internet's idealistic 1960s-era infrastructure with a more pragmatic millennial sensibility. Anonymity may allow people to reveal their true selves, but maybe our true selves aren't our best selves. Facebook makes cyberspace more like the real world: dull but civilized. The masked-ball period of the Internet is ending. Where people led double lives, real and virtual, now they lead single ones again.

The fact that people yearned not to be liberated from their daily lives but to be more deeply embedded in them is an extraordinary insight, as basic and era-defining in its way as Jobs' realization that people prefer a graphical desktop to a command line or pretty computers to boring beige ones.

Here Grossman tells a familiar story about the relationship of the Internet to counter-culture, one considerably less complex than the one told by Manuel Castells that involves "the techno-meritocratic culture," "the hacker culture," "the virtual communitarian culture," and "the entrepreneurial culture" and the sometimes volatile “intersection of big science, military research, and libertarian culture" and its amalgams of identity positions.

Grossman's narrative about the potential twin threats to privacy and the public good posed by Facebook also lacks the deep thinking of Siva Vaidhyanathan's The Googlization of Everything about the social web and its corporate ideology.

Finally, the assertion that Facebook is a juggernaut headed for global dominance ignores the phenomenon of individual national social networks and fragmented social and linguistic spaces that Geert Lovink has described.

Grossman offers a diverting account of Zuckerberg the polymath empath but his assertion that Zuckerberg is reshaping the architecture of the Internet just isn't true. Particularly at a time when a number of policy issues are at stake that require forms of civic education and collective deliberation about the social web, we don't need more great-man histories. Instead, understanding complex issues like IP address shortages, threats to network neutrality, the new domestic spaces of ubiquitous computing, and our place as humans in the Internet of things will take more than a hagiography for TIME's Person of the Year in 2010.

Letter to UC Faculty

Okay, normally I don't reproduce things in their entirety, and I feel compelled to do a lot of counter-reading of the arguments in a given digital text.

But I am going to break my rule when it comes to this letter from the University Libraries and the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication. Rate hikes for subscriptions to scholarly databases have become a real problem for anyone who wants to keep resources available to students in difficult budget times. Speaking personally, we've had serious problems in the Humanities Core Course with nearly losing access to some critical digital collections that were important for our information literacy goals.

I'm like most people who teach in the UC system: a lot of my work appears in closed peer-reviewed journals that is aggregated into products sold by a very limited number of for-profit companies.

For example, to see some of my work, your library would have to pay Taylor and Francis/Sage (for Discourse), Elsevier (for Journal of Second Language Writing), and Oxford Journals (for Literary and Linguistic Computing). Gale controls access to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, which I wrote for in grad school. And if I want to point someone to reviews of my book, the pointer would go via one of the portals at Wiley. So I understand that boycotts are not appealing, but this is a particularly egregious case.

Re: Informational Update on a Possible UC Systemwide Boycott of the Nature Publishing Group

Dear UC Divisional Chairs and Members of the UC Faculty,

UC Libraries are confronting an impending crisis in providing access to journals from the Nature Publishing Group (NPG). NPG has insisted on increasing the price of our license for Nature and its affiliated journals by 400 percent beginning in 2011, which would raise our cost for their 67 journals by well over $1 million dollars per year.

While Nature and other NPG publications are among the most prestigious of academic journals, such a price increase is of unprecedented magnitude. NPG has made their ultimatum with full knowledge that our libraries are under economic distress—a fact widely publicized in an Open Letter to Licensed Content Providers and distributed by the California Digital Library (CDL) in May 2009. In fact, CDL has worked successfully with many other publishers and content providers over the past year to address the University’s current economic challenges in a spirit of mutual problem solving, with positive results including lowering our overall costs for electronic journals by $1 million dollars per year.

NPG by contrast has been singularly unresponsive to the plight of libraries and has employed a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy that directs major price increases to various institutions in different years. Their proposed new license fee is especially difficult to accept in a time of shrinking UC library budgets and with the many sacrifices we all continue to make Systemwide. Capitulating to NPG now would wipe out all of the recent cost-saving measures taken by CDL and our campus libraries to reduce expenditures for electronic journals. More information about the UC Libraries’ concerns, including a history of previous unsustainable price increases from this publisher and others, is available on the CDL’s Challenges to Licensing page at http://www.cdlib.org/services/collections/current/challenges.html

UC Libraries have already taken a stand against NPG. After recently acquiring Scientific American, NPG doubled the institutional site license fee and raised the price of an institutional print subscription seven-fold. In response, UC Libraries, along with numerous other institutions throughout the country, discontinued their license to the online version and reduced the number of print subscriptions. As a first response to the current NPG proposal, UC Libraries plan to forgo all online subscriptions to any new NPG journals. But more drastic actions may be necessary.
What can UC Faculty do to help?

UC Faculty and researchers author a significant percentage of all articles published in NPG journals and are a major force in shaping the prestige of its publications. In the past six years, UC authors have contributed approximately 5300 articles to these journals, 638 of them in the flagship journal Nature. Using NPG’s own figures, an analysis by CDL suggests that UC articles published in Nature alone have contributed at least $19 million dollars in revenue to NPG over the past 6 years—or more than $3 million dollars per year for just that one journal. Moreover, UC Faculty supply countless hours serving as reviewers, editors, and advisory board members.

Many UC Faculty now believe that a larger and more concerted response is necessary to counter the monopolistic tactics of NPG. Keith Yamamoto, a Professor and Executive Vice Dean at UCSF (yamamoto@cmp.ucsf.edu) who helped lead a successful boycott against Elsevier and Cell Press in 2003 (http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA379265.html), has begun to assemble a group of Faculty that will help lead a UC Systemwide boycott of NPG. This means that unless NPG is willing to maintain our current licensing agreement, UC Faculty would ask the UC Libraries to suspend their online subscriptions entirely, and all UC Faculty would be strongly encouraged to:

• Decline to peer review manuscripts for journals from the Nature Publishing Group.
• Resign from Nature Publishing Group editorial and advisory boards.
• Cease to submit papers to the Nature Publishing Group.
• Refrain from advertising any open or new UC positions in Nature Publishing Group journals.
• Talk widely about Nature Publishing Group pricing tactics and business strategies with colleagues outside UC, and encourage sympathy actions such as those listed above.

We clearly recognize that the consequences of such a boycott would be complex and present hardships for individual UC researchers. But we believe that in the end, we will all benefit if UC can achieve a sustainable and mutually rewarding relationship with NPG. In the meantime, UC scholars can help break the monopoly that commercial and for-profit entities like NPG hold over the work that we create through positive actions such as:

• Complying with open access policies from Federal funding agencies such as the NIH
(http://publicaccess.nih.gov).
• Utilizing eScholarship, an open access repository service from CDL
(http://www.escholarship.org/publish_postprints.html).
• Considering other high-quality research publishing outlets, including open access journals such as those published by PLoS and others.
• Insisting on language in publication agreements that allows UC authors to retain their copyright (http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/manage/retain_copyrights.html).

A full list of journals currently licensed from NPG by UC Libraries is attached. We will keep you informed as this situation progresses, including the possibility of canceling all NPG titles.

Please feel free to contact the University Librarian on your campus with questions or concerns, or any of us. You can also communicate your concern to key contacts at NPG. The managing director of NPG, Steven Inchcoombe, and other members of the executive committee can be reached at exec@nature.com.

Sincerely,
Laine Farley
Executive Director
California Digital Library
University of California, Office of the President

Richard A. Schneider
Associate Professor, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery
University of California – San Francisco
Chair, University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication

Brian E. C. Schottlaender
The Audrey Geisel University Librarian
University of California – San Diego
Convener, University Librarians Council

Update: For more on the rhetorical moves in the librarians' call for a boycott, see "Fight Club Soap" from Bethany Nowviskie.

Momma's Got a Brand New Bag

Check out the revamped version of Bag News Notes, where those seeking a "progressive site dedicated to visual politics and the analysis of news images" can find a number of new features. I have followed the Bag for years, so it is interesting to see them branch out into new areas of digital rhetoric in their new "Salon" section.

Hacking the Academy Update

Speaking of Dan Cohen, I wanted to provide an update on the Hacking the Academy book project, about which I expressed some skepticism here. One week later it does look like Cohen seems to have done the impossible in soliciting enough material to create an actual book to be published both by a scholarly publisher and online in an open access format.

Contributors include many, many friends of Virtualpolitik: Cathy Davidson, David Parry, Jana Remy, Mark Sample, Leslie Madsen-Brooks, Holly Willis, Virginia Kuhn, Craig Dietrich, Matthew Gold, Alex Juhasz, Michael Wesch, Bethany Nowviskie, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Chris Kelty, John Unsworth, Stephen Ramsay, Tara McPherson, Ian Bogost, and Matthew Kirschenbaum. I will be included at the end as part of the "coda" called "Criticisms of this Book."

Fiction Truer Than Fact

Who can resist this piece from The Onion: New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It Let Someone Else Report On This Bullshit? For those who follow how newspapers cover social media every day . . . and do so in a totally perfunctory fashion, we appreciate how spot-on this parody of media cynicism really is, from the talking-head academic expert to the man-on-the-street portrait of digital youth at its most unthinking worst.

See Ian Bogost's write-up at "Endless String of Meaningless Buzzwords" for more about media non-events.

Rhetorical Analysis 101

Okay, so I'm a rhetorician who specializes in digital media. In my case, that means that I'm interested in both rhetoric in digital media and rhetoric about digital media.

The front section of today's New York Times presents an interesting case study. There are three articles concerned with the Internet: "Tell-All Generation Keeps Some Things Offline," "From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad," and "States Move to Allow Overseas and Military Voters to Cast Ballots by Internet."

The "Tell-All Generation" has already inspired groans from some of my colleagues. First of all, even though it is topping the list of the most e-mailed stories this morning, it's like many most e-mailed stories, old news. The article deals with a study of Berkeley students that we were talking about here on Virtualpolitik last month, just a few days after it was published online. Second, it repeats certain commonplaces about their being a "digital generation" that inspires skepticism from those who study histories of media adoption and rebuttals from researchers like Sonia Livingstone. As Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it on his Twitter stream: "Another profoundly stupid @nytimes trend story about the 'digital generation.' This time, it CARES about privacy."

The "Preaching Jihad" story is one of a number of stories that have appeared recently about Anwar al-Awlaki a charismatic US-born preacher, explicator of Islam, and advocate of jihad who has used the Internet to disseminate his message to the English-speaking public worldwide and has been linked to inspiring attacks planned for Fort Hood, Detroit, and Times Square. He is described as a creator of "prolific online lectures" who brings radical Islam to the disaffected through a perverse form of distance learning. Anwar al-Awlaki has also been featured in a number of other news stories in recent months about the possibility that he might be assassinated for his views in items from Al Jazeera, The Christian Science Monitor, and Newsweek. Having opened the Virtualpolitik book with an account of a misguided congressional intelligence hearing on "Terrorist Use of the Internet," I tend to be wary of the ways that new technologies get associated with criminality in our popular culture, and I wonder if the Times is pandering to that stereotype with lines about how this man has supposedly "harnessed the Internet for the goals of Al Qaeda" while not presenting any counterarguments to regulating his religious and political speech. For example, it discusses al-Awlaki's "now-defunct Web site anwar-alawlaki.com" without any exploration of what might be an interesting story about why his Free Web Hosting account might have been pulled down last November. I'm certainly not arguing that there are no limits to online speech, particularly when it incites violence, but it might be interesting to have at least some discussion of how hosting services decide about what constitutes banned "hate speech" on the site.

Finally, there was the story about Internet voting that was buried on page seventeen. It doesn't have a prurient interest in teen sexuality or an telegenic Osama Bin Laden replacement boogie man to make it worth more attention. It also is typical in framing the issue of Internet voting primarily in terms of protecting the security of the polling place rather than imagining politics differently with some new algorithmic possibilities and more opportunities for political participation, as Chris Kelty has argued.

Neural Nets

Yay! A nice review of the Virtualpolitik book in Neural, which is available in both English and Italian. This is my second review of the book in the Italian press, but it looks like Italian university libraries have yet to buy a copy, according to WorldCat.

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."

Lending an Ear

A big announcement from Virtualpolitik pal Ted Striphas. I hope that all VP readers will consider pitching in as he crowd sources the debugging of his audiobook project.

I’ve been hinting for the last few weeks that I had a big announcement brewing. Well, at long last, here it is: together we’re going to make a free, Creative Commons-licensed audiobook of The Late Age of Print! First, some background on what inspired the project, and then a word or two on how you can help.

Listening to Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price on a long car trip got me thinking: why not make an audiobook out of The Late Age of Print? And why not, like Anderson, give the digital recording away for free? The thought had barely crossed my mind when reality started to sink in. “You’re no Chris Anderson,” I told myself. “You don’t have the time or the resources to make an audiobook out of Late Age. Just forget about it.”

Well, I didn’t forget about it. I figured if I couldn’t make an audiobook myself, then I’d do the next best thing: let the computer do it for me, using a text-to-speech (T-T-S) synthesizer. The more I thought about the project, the more convinced I became that it was a good idea. It wouldn’t just be cool to be able to listen to Late Age on an iPod; an audio edition would finally make the book accessible to vision impaired people, too.

And so I got down to work. I extracted all of the text from the free, Creative Commons-licensed PDF of Late Age and proceeded to text-to-speech-ify it, one chapter at a time. I played back my first recording — the Introduction — but it was disaster! The raw text had all sorts of remnants from the original book layout (footnotes, page headers/numbers, words hyphenated due to line breaks, and whole lot more). They seriously messed up the recording, and so I knew they needed to go. I began combing through the text, only to discover that the cleanup would take me, working alone, many more hours than I could spare, especially with a newborn baby in my life. Frustrated, I nearly abandoned the project for a second time.

Then it dawned on me: if I’m planning on giving away the audiobook for free, then why not get people who might be interested in hearing Late Age in on it, too? Thus was born the Late Age of Print wiki, the host site for The Late Age of Print open source audiobook project. The plan is for all of us, using the wiki, to create a Creative Commons-licensed text-to-speech version of the book, which will be available for free online.

There’s a good deal of work for us to do, but don’t be daunted! If you choose to donate a large chunk of your time to help out the cause, then that’s just super. But don’t forget that projects like this one also succeed when a large number of people invest tiny amounts of their time as well. Your five or ten minutes of editing, combined with the work of scores of other collaborators, will yield a top-notch product in the end. I’ve posted some guidelines on the wiki site to help get you started.

I doubt that I have a large enough network of my own to pull off this project, so if your blog, Tweet, contribute to listservs, or otherwise maintain a presence online, please, please, please spread the word!

Thank you in advance for your contributions, whatever they may be. In the meantime, if you have any questions about The Late Age of Print open source audiobook project, don’t hesitate to email me. I’d love to hear from you!

Waiting for the Appropriating Moment

The New York Times describes an interesting example of appropriation art in a story about "Texts without Context," which describes David Shields' new book Reality Hunger, a "manifesto" composed half of borrowed and unattributed quotations. In the NYT review of the actual book, reviewer Luc Sante tries to assess Shields' claim that a literary movement is brewing, one that can also be seen in Jonathan Lethem's recent essay on "The ecstasy of influence," which ran in Harper's.

Maybe the Packrats Might Like More Fliers

How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?

Obsolescence and Its Discontents

VP colleague Kathleen Fitzpatrick has been busy with her book-in-progress Planned Obsolescence.

There’s a delicious ambiguity in that sentence: is it too late for a book — the literal, physical object — to change the world, or is it too late for any textual form? This text isn’t yet a book, though it’s headed in that direction. And possible or not, it’s determined to change the world, or at least the small segment of it where our colleges and universities reside.

And it’s attempting to begin creating that change here, with this site. One of the points that this text argues hardest about is the need to reform peer review for the digital age, insisting that peer review will be a more productive, more helpful, more transparent, and more effective process if conducted in the open. And so here’s the text, practicing what it preaches, available online for open review.

I’ll be relying on these reviews in revising the manuscript before its final submission. If all goes according to plan, the book will be forthcoming from NYU Press, which is sending the manuscript out for blind review as well. I’m grateful to those anonymous readers, and will certainly take their comments very seriously. But the conversation that takes place here will be key to my revision process.

Please read and comment here, either all at once or at your leisure. Respond to the text, but also respond to the other readers. I’ll be joining in the discussion as well, of course, and I’ll also be posting more general thoughts about the project’s development to the site’s community blog.

Portions of chapter 3 were originally published in the Journal of Electronic Publishing and on MediaCommons. Portions of chapter 1 were presented as part of an online conference held at Interdisciplines. Thanks are due to the editors and coordinators of those projects, and to the many scholars whose responses to the talks I’ve given about this book have helped to shape its development.

Finally, enormous thanks are due to Eric Zinner, Monica McCormick, Bob Stein, Christian Wach, Brian Hoffman, and everyone else who made this publication possible.

Make sure to weigh in with your own commentary soon!

A Black Eye for Open Access

Note how coverage of the murderous University of Alabama biologist Amy Bishop at the New York Times in "A Case for Tenure That Some See as Falling Short" implies that online journals would not be likely to be peer-reviewed and would be unlikely to strengthen a tenure case.

The publications include a recent paper in The International Journal of General Medicine, published electronically by Dovepress, essentially a scientific vanity press. Dr. Bishop’s paper in that journal, on nerve cells grown in the laboratory and exposed to drugs used to treat depression, lists her school-age children as the first three authors. The fourth author is herself, and the fifth is her husband, who is identified as being at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, although he does not have a position there.

Differentiating legitimate online journals from vanity press publications would seem to be important, given the unsustainability of current print models for academic publishing.

On its home page, the journal claims to be indexed in the large legitimate medical database PubMed, which many biological sciences students use, and posts a link that seems to affiliate itself with the open content initiative OCLC. It also includes the following description of its rigor:

An international, peer-reviewed, Open Access journal that focuses on general and internal medicine, pathogenesis, epidemiology, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment protocols. The journal is characterized by the rapid reporting of reviews, original research and clinical studies across all disease areas.

Exploding the University

The session on "Digital Media and Learning as a Post-Academic Field" at the Digital Media and Learning Conference encouraged participants to keep and edit notes on the session, which were displayed as the panelists were speaking, along with the backchannel thread from participants in the audience. Despite the publicity given to recent incidents of "Tweckling" on the backchannel in conferences, in this intimate gathering all who were present behaved themselves. And although not everyone on the bill made it in to the conference, since computer scientist Alex Pang and academic blogger and instructional technologist David Parry couldn't be there, it was still a lively exchange of ideas in the third panel of the conference on higher education.

(Unfortunately, I couldn't attend the higher education panel after my own at the conference, which featured Tracy Fullerton, who discussed her creation of Pathfinder U. The game is described below.)



Kathleen Fitzpatrick talked about "getting our students to do things openly" and in public, collaborative ways that foster the "use of digital rhetorics." However, she expressed concern that "we don't seem to use them to the same degree as we teach them," because "we get credit for the formal stuff." As Fitzpatrick asked, "What if that wasn't the case?" She inquired further: "How can we model the critical/analytical skills we want our students to have--particularly in our writing & audiences." She acknowledged, however, that "making this sort of change, particularly institutionally, is hard work," although she pointed out that the collective work being done at Media Commons "may represent a model of cross-institutional work." As for her own work at Planned Obsolescence, she characterized it as part of a "strategy for making such changes," because she emphasizes "changes in peer review, and what that means to the ideas surrounding authorship/readership." She asserted that "universities need to rethink what publishing is and why they engage in it." When considering if publishing should function as a revenue-center, she insisted that "the mission of the university is diffusion of knowledge, and university publishing should reflect this." For her, institutional collaboration (university presses, libraries, IT, academic units) should be an important part of serving that value.

Jeremy Hunsinger then described himself as someone with "an aversion to walls, classrooms, and pedagogy" as too divorced from the "essential question of episteme and practice" that are central to his STS outlook and his personal philosophy that "we learn (in school and out) informally," and "pedogogy treats learners as kids." Hunsinger argued that "Digital Media and Learning isn't new; it's existed as an approach for about forty-five years." He also claimed that digital media served "as an escape from the strictures (economic & control) of the university." He pointed to "hack-labs, as collective good" as an exemplary case of "post or extra-academic education" and "spaces that encourage learning not teaching." (p2pu was also cited as another model that complicated the Chicago School model of education from Dewey et al.)

Panel chair Alexander Halavais introduced himself with a "provocation" with a reference to the panel on higher education that I chaired, where Diane Harley, author of a recent Mellon Report on Higher Ed, had cautioned that those devoted to "blowing up the university" with digital media tools may be misguided. Halavais explained that "reexploding" the university might not be such a bad idea to recognize that "learning happens in a network or web of activities (often self-directed)" rather than in institutions.

Lately Halavais has been occupied with the "question about mobile media" and his role in the "Collaboratory" that served as the "inner space for which DML served as the "public space." He said that the challenges in expanding the K-12 digital learning model to higher education even included questions like "What kind of software do we want to use?" Basecamp might be better for the adult group, while Remix World might be better for digital youth. Yet, as Halavais asked, "Why is our collaborative software different from what we want students to use?" He pointed out that "maybe students should be asked to think about 'grown up' project planning skills" that include budgets and schedules to be in keeping with the outlook of the Obama administration and its priorities for education. As he noted, most of life is about "learning informally" and the "sea of blue" that illustrated one DML conference talk. However, even though informal learning over a lifetime is undoubtedly important, the MacArthur Foundation saw the value of "building a bridge back to the institutions" and chose to praise a "mix of researchers and practitioners."

Should online collaborative tools and spaces be different for kids and for grown-ups? Is autonomy in terms of interest-driven learning as applicable to adults as it is to kids? Is the importance of sharing ideas openly as important for adults as it is for kids? How can institutions support more informal kinds of research, and how can that research build a bridge back to institutions?

These questions took up much of the question-and-answer part of the panel in which participants admitted that "all of our work as academics becomes formalized." They also pointed to the irony of asking these questions in the context of a formal academic conference, since a THATcamp would seem preferable "if we really value informal learning."

When talking about to what degree should kids and adults be shielded from economic concerns," Halavais pointed to the example of Japanese kids asked to clean their own schools before turning to the question of how research agendas should be handled.

Can we create a research community in which research is:
- Based on our interests
- Openly documented, with opportunities for peer mentoring
- Published, then filtered
- Without destructive competition

Does open source present a peer-to-peer model that we can follow?
- Peer reviewed scholarship pre completion
- Peer reviewed scholarship after "completion"
- Peer reviewed scholars

At one point Halavais quipped "tenure should only be granted to people who don't want tenure." His last question to the audience was "Why I am still a professor?"

Although, the MacArthur Foundation might "provide scaffolding for the new discipline of DML to form," some asked if there should "be more friction, more argument, more . . ." If the theme was really about "diverse participation," they questioned why should participants be agreeing with it so directly and warned against the dangers of the "tendency to genuflect in this environment." Furthermore, despite the fact that "fields are built by shared interests," Renee Hobbs emphasized the importance of "calling out the economic powerhouse that takes away our ability to determine what counts as knowledge." -

These questions followed: What happens when the funding dies? Are we critical enough of the infrastructure that supports the nascent field? What's with all the talk about public/private? Who do we invite to these things who will challenge us more directly?

Hunsinger reminded those in the room about the difference between "interdisciplinary" and "transdisciplinary" enterprises that "mean different things." In response Hobbs talked about the "problem of training people for both media studies and education" when there were "obligations to PhD students facing a world where silos don't talk to each other." Hunsinger agreed that such students faced the "exclusion of both silos." Others piped up that the "disappearance of humanities disciplines" that were de-funded at universities from the digital media and learning field only made things worse. To this Halavais suggested that "collaborations with museums and libraries, not just universities" might provide some solutions.

After the group admitted that they lacked "shared axioms," they suggested some other possible terms, such as "shared axiologies, "shared epistemologies," or "shared ontologies." Then they turned to the bullet points for "who do we need next year":

* Deans and presidents, who can make the field happen on their campuses

* More "cranks" and people who are highly critical of edtech, but ones that are more Maxine Greene than Andrew Keen.

As the session ended there was energetic discussion of the problem of travel funding, of boycotting journals that were not open access, and of the virtues and vices of electronic resources such as IJLM and the eScholarship repository that were "technically open but badly designed for public access." Of course, they also noted the ironic lack of live streaming or videorecording of most of the panels at the conference.

Rate My Newspaper

"Dr. Amy Bishop of Alabama-Huntsville well regarded by students" is a newspaper story actually devoted to the professorial mass murderer's ratings on RateMyProfessor.com. It's perhaps the worst kind of "Facebook journalism" that I have seen in connection with this case.

The Mail Instinct

In "Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome," this "most e-mailed" story from this week's New York Times about -- what else -- the most e-mailed stories of the New York Times claims to present some actual research about what makes certain news stories have epistolary appeal rather than just another example of Internet infinite regress.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.

The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”

But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.

A Vanished Civilization

Reader Michael Thomas points out that this item about "The World Tomorrow If the Internet Disappeared" has become a piece of Internet ephemera that is widely distributed via e-mail and other informal channels.

Much of the humor in the user-generated content in this Photoshop contest depends on knowledge of print artifacts and the oddity of Internet cultural practices when transposed to the page or to the architectures of physical rather than virtual marketplaces.

There is even a James Joyce joke for the literati!

Leap Year

Today I almost threw out the box with the disk with EndNote and its license. It takes up space in my office area, it is for a version that is no longer supported, and it reminds me that I paid a huge amount of money as a freshly minted Ph.D. for software that I truly hated trying to use.

Now I use Zotero much more happily for writing books and articles and for generating bibliographies for students and colleagues. It's not always true that the free, open-source product is the easier alternative, but it is in the case of this wonderful bibliographical organization software from the Center for History and New Media, which supports many different formats, media types, and works with Amazon, WorldCat, Google Books, and most library catalogs.

Apparently I was a sucker not to chuck it out, since I received this message from the company that produces EndNote the very same day:

Please read this alert about an import issue with EndNote versions X through 8 beginning in 2010.

In many cases, bibliographic records with a publication date of 2010 or later will not import the year data into EndNote. When this occurs, the year must be added manually—see FAQ for more details. All other data for the reference imports correctly.

We know this importing issue is an important one to you, and apologize for the inconvenience. As our records indicate you are using a version that is no longer supported, we would like to extend a special upgrade offer to EndNote X3 of $59.95 (expires 12/31/2009).

I write about new media! I cite new books! This little glitch about books produced in the rapidly approaching coming year would make the software laughably unhelpful to me. I read the FAQ that they recommended, and then attempted to view the link to the video, which showed this black load screen for a hilariously long time and then refused to play beyond the first frame.

I will definitely go back and throw out that EndNote now.

All That Twitters May Not Be Gold

When commenting on the use of Twitter as a vehicle for public comment on proceedings of the Federal Trade commission, Steven Clift points out the limitations of this single-platform approach.

This may be one of the first government-hosted conferences using Twitter for people to submit questions. (I wonder why not also allow e-mail since most Internet users still don't use Twitter?) On a related noted, why only 31 public comment submission so far? -

Ironically, this short format communications channel is being used for a serious topic that deserves more column space, a "New Media Workshop" on "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" to be held December 1-2, 2009 in Washington, DC and via webcast.

The Federal Trade Commission will hold two days of workshops on December 1 and 2, 2009, to explore how the Internet has affected journalism. The event is free and open to the public. The workshop will assemble representatives from print, online, broadcast and cable news organizations, academics, consumer advocates, bloggers, and other new media representatives.

For more see the FTC Twitter stream. Of course, as the screen capture above demonstrates (click to enlarge), it is important to follow the right FTC.

Virtual News

Sometimes the New York Times has excellent coverage of the Internet and gaming, especially if it has work written by new media journalist Clive Thompson. Sometimes it has terrible coverage. Not all the stories about online gaming in the newspaper were ill-informed today. In "Chinese Agencies Struggle Over Video Game" not only describes an interesting dispute between the authoritarian government's Ministry of Culture and the more culturally conservative Administration of Press and Publication over regulation of the game World of Warcraft. It also pointed out that U.S. massive games tend to have a much smaller part of the total market share than games developed in China. For more coverage of the controversy, check out "Clarification from the Ministry of Culture" from Web2Asia.

But "Virtual Goods Start Bringing Real Paydays" makes a number of missteps, even though it talks to real gamers about their virtual purchases and identifies sources from big players in the market of social games like Zynga, Playfish, and Playdom. The big mistake that it makes is relying on the opinions of venture capitalists, who tend to have poor understanding of reputation economies or the subversive potentials of online social networks.

Analysts estimate that virtual goods could bring in a billion dollars in the United States and around $5 billion worldwide this year — all for things that, aside from perhaps a few hours of work by an artist and a programmer, cost nothing to produce.

“It’s a fantastic business,” said Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that has invested $10 million in several virtual goods companies. “Because it’s digital, the marginal cost for every one you sell is zero, so you have 100 percent margins.”

First of all, anyone who collects virtual goods will tell you that not all digital items are created equal and that "few hours of work by an artist" has to be done by someone who can create a compelling image using only a few pixels wisely. Games that are successful, like Farmville, which is one of their examples, rely on having a range of crop and animal animations that are visually engaging at a number of scales. To have the cuteness quotient of what the Japanese call "kawaii" characteristics requires a particular attention to the aesthetics of the screen.

Second, the idea that players are merely passive consumers eager to purchase meaningless tokens underestimates the likelihood of player revolts, particularly since -- as the article itself admits -- most players play for free. For example, last year's PackRat revolt, which I am writing about in the upcoming collection Facebook and Philosophy shows how participatory culture punishes what it perceives as systems of greed.

Finally, there is a tone of amusement at this mysterious behavior, despite all the explanations that the article offers, that seems ironic, given that something like the greeting card industry doesn't get similar amazement for having customers. Buy your friend a greeting card and it may well cost you over five dollars, including stamp, gas, and time for selection. And then who can see it? How does it give your friend any continuing pleasure once it is opened? Virtual goods are profoundly about the social and the public dimension of online interactions, a quality that the NYT doesn't always seem to get.