White paper notes
From Driscollwiki
Meetings
- January 26, 2010
- January 27, 2010
- February 3, 2010
- March 3, 2010
- March 10, 2010
- March 24, 2010
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 1970
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Magnus_Enzensberger
- Counter-culture inspired vision of "underground" media
- Collective communication
- Smaller nodes
- Anticipating the visibility of participatory culture
Comparing metaphors
- Fiske, "Iceberg", beneath the surface
- Marx, "Boiling kettle"
Practical challenges
Visibility
- Who produces artifacts?
- Challenges of measurement
- How do you see the "iceberg" under the water?
Measurement
- Where are the boundaries?
- Numbers of YT videos? Comments?
- Fan pages?
- How do we ensure that constructs are culturally significant?
- Rather than a "reduction", using measurement as theoretical raw materials
- (Historical note: one reason complexity was less common in measurement was the lack of computing power to run the tests. Now we can rely on software to run much more complex tests.)
History
- Communication lacks comprehensive discipline-specific history
- Examine historical phenomena
- Scope and scale
- Artifactual details
- Can we find information from previous events?
- Is it possible to do work on 9/11 response, for example?
- Paradox: despite the proliferation of digital artifacts, Internet is ... "ahistorical"?
- Or is it a strange kind of history? Nostalgia? Collapsed history...?
How Historical?
- Must we remain rooted in a particular time, socio-econo layers
- Can we talk about the Bible? Lucha libre?
- Can we do a case study via pre 20th historical artifacts?
Fiske as "meta theorist"
- Broad synthesis of other people's case studies
- This approach makes it difficult to ascertain the nuances, rich details of each case
Fiske, radical / progressive distinction
- Responding to Frankfurt pressure, "Are you sufficiently Marxist? Are you radical enough?"
- Pop culture as a "distraction"
- Disengagement myth: more people vote in Idol than in the U.S. presidental election
- Voting mechanisms, trust: same anxiety play out in Idol as in presidential politics
- Thus, Fiske creates this distinction in order to address "progressive" political action though they might not be self-identified as "radical"
- Connects to investigations of feminism in fandom
- Fiske wants to value these activities before they are cleaved by a "revolutionary" critique/attitude
- e.g. Radway reading romance novels: feminist in practice, if not name
- How do we integrate more work re: Tea Party, 9/12 movements?
- Progressive Republican movements
- Radical Republicans?
- Are these identity categories?
- Religious Right as a counter-culture
- "Discernment movement", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discernment_Ministries
Raymond Williams, "Structure of feelings"
(Media Matters, 8-9)
- What it "feels like" to live in a particular place, time
- Separating the politics from the practices
- Scott Brown / Barack Obama as part of the same phenomenon
- What it feels like to be an "agent of change"?
- Evidence of something larger
- Many different, interrelated structures of feeling
- Difficult to generalize
- Building layers of complexity
- Social "sensibility"
Connections:
- Hartley's plebiscite industries
- Re: the pleasurable feeling of voting
- Hegel, zeitgeist
- Habermas, public sphere
How are structures of feeling play out in voting scenarios?
- Certain voices are louder, identified as experts
- Idol panel, Fox/MSNBC discourses: evaluative judgement
- Jenkins: MSM can marginalize, Participatory culture can negate
- These evaluative voices provide data to use in the voting decision
- MSM will attempt to marginalize popular negations
- e.g. Sanjaya on Idol, the Colbert bridge naming, moot as sexiest man?
- How do the participants talk about their feelings? Can we trust them?
- If they affirm our hypothesis, Marxists call them "dupes"
- If they do not, does that mean we are wrong?
Local / Global, Online / Offline
- Local nodes connected via online spaces
- Must there be local, f2f communication?
- Could it occur at cons?
- What about shared experiences like cinema?
- Or watching live events?
- Microstructures - "globalized imagination"
- Used to study terrorist cells
- Globalization in daily lives?
Tendency to map local:offline, global:online
- But can some sites be local?
- E.g., LRRG forum is my "local" online community
- Do people sense "distance" on the web?
- Aiwah Ong, micro/macro global flows
History continuities
- Various fandoms with links back in time
Past failures
- Nonprofits historically failing to galvanize pop cultures
- Working with rock concerts, etc.
Next steps
- Invisible children
- Harry Potter Alliance
- Methodological questions, challenges
- Pilots
- Connecting to 9/12 + Tea Party groups
- Battlecry
- Where there any fan groups supporting Scott Brown?
- Sports fans following Flutie?
Popular political
- Is Glenn Beck fandom inbounds?
- Is there a "tipping point" for those fan groups?
- When they are solicited to action (e.g. 9/12)?
Titling?
Keywords, all with their own weird bits
- Participatory
- Media
- Culture
- Democracy
- Civic engagement
- Citizenship
Wiki version
http://sites.google.com/site/participatorydemocracyproject/
- Videos + images
- Sections with static URLs
- Comments section
- Being explicit about the boundaries
- Transparent dates: changes, etc.
- Community-building through attracting comments
- "Empty page syndrome"
- Critique?
- If there is a pushback, incorporate it into the text
- "Teach the controversy"
- Critical reflection
- Citation
- Provide copy-pasteable citation?
- Timestamps
Research questions
- Where do they come from?
- Who is writing them?
- How do they connect to outcomes?
Where is our debate?
- We are drawing a lot of data in
- But we have yet to really hash out some of the details
- What is contested?
Finding a common language
- How do we connect across disciplines?
Bias
- Resisting seeing our path in these cases
- Only finding examples that support this point
Methods
- Pressure to submit to IRB soon
- Participant observation
- Preparing lists of questions
- Are we using video?
- 18+?
- Participant (video?) journals
- Online surveys
IM interviews
Flourish experience:
- Providing option of skype/voice
- Overlap awkwardness
- Chat slang troubles quotation
- "Middle ground" among formality
- Self-reporting demographic info
- Good faith efforts
IRB challenges
- Age verification
- Parental consent
- Privacy
- Data storage
- Inviting someone to the Weds meeting
- Open forums, "public behavior"?
- Closed, private, invite-only listservs/fora
- At MIT, researchers required to announce themselves
- No deception
IRB to do
- Creating boilerplate forum/listserv announcement paragraph
- Could we create researcher .sigs?
This user is a researcher from Acme Research Group. His or her contributions are part of an on-going research project and he or she may be collecting data and quotations from this forum/list. To learn more about this project, please visit: http://www.acme.edu/rg/aboutus.html
Community norms
- With HP Alliance, asking for age verification could do damage to the community by creating subclasses among participants
Next steps, March 10
- More case studies
- Personal trajectories
- HPA, IC
- Quant survey data
- Qual personal diaries
- More theoretical work
- Online portal development
- Connecting to work happening elsewhere
Next year
- Online, offline working groups
Research hubs
- Building a network around "public participation and new media"
- Ito, Gardner, Kahn(fearless leader), Cohen, Martin
- Just finished a proposal for lengthier funding
- Nothing is set in stone
- Kahn seeking large-scale study of groups of students over time
- Gardner doing interviews with individual students
- Ito, Jenkins doing case studies of organizations looking at youth
- How does this relate to our current work?
- Ready to launch series of case studies over the next few years
- Free to both connect with MacArthur group and doing our individual work
- Range of projects, methods
- Postdocs + current students tying into their diss
- Thinking now about what do we want to do in the next 6mos
- If it connects w/ MacA, that's good but not a requirement
- Anything we do will likely inform the bigger project
Forum tool
- Warren Sack, tools for listservs/ newsgroups
- http://people.ucsc.edu/~wsack/
- Conversation map, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=325856
- Joe Duman, using Sack's tool with health
- How to make this useful to others in the community?
- Ben: beyond academic community
Reviewing draft from March 10
Service learning
- Tends not to be tied to civics
- Different implementations in different schools
- Graduate requirement
- Implemented across curriculum
- Considered good practice for college admissions
- Ben's ex: clean up yard but not critiquing what made it dirty in the first place
- Gap between service and activism
- Similar to distinction between charity and activism
Foregrounding intergenerational relationships
- Start with youth and go elsewhere
- Asserting the value of intergenerational relationships in youth-focused research
- Advice: being "bigger than the funding stream"
"Nodes"
- "Premature" but preliminary stab at that kind of analysis
- Need more data! More case studies?
- Choice of "nodes" to avoid "linearity"
- Connects to Katie Salen's call for an "ecological model"
- Each node offers a site for intervention
- Being clear that these are "emerging"
- Points for comparing and contrasting across nodes + cases
- Clearly not (yet?) a "model"
- How to present the nodes as non-hierarchical?
- Could they be presented in a network diagram?
- Worked example
- Interactive mapping of nodes
- Could we send out a link to a flash tool that let people arranges nodes, resources, connections in a way that reflects their self-knowing?
- We'd get back snapshots of what people think of their own orgs
Further discussion of nodes
- Avoiding linearity
- Is the node layout a "model" or a "metaphor"?
Trajectories of fan studies
- Aswin's experience indicates that Indian and US fan studies are on opposite paths
- Avoid a "defensive" stance
- We need to be clear that we value participatory culture
- We are not taking a position among the civic/active v. non-civic/pathetic hierarchies
- Not validating popular culture or defending it based on these civic outcomes
- Conventional high/fine arts/culture are connected to civic activity in a way that popular arts/culture are not
- Emphasis on processes of popular culture rather than the artifacts
- Coffee houses (Habermas) and bowling alleys (Putnam) are not metaphors
- They were not intrinsically civic, political
- They are hybrid spaces, commercial/civic
- Platforms, interface
Participatory culture interfaces
Perhaps some of our nodes are qualities of participatory culture interfaces/spaces.
- Shared "content worlds"
- Identities, metaphors, utopias
- Affinity groups, expressions, shared pleasures and desires
- Sense of community
By separating them out, are we left with more of a trajectory?
Affinity spaces
- Gee
- Spaces and not communities because they didn't necessarily have common identities
Self-organization
Depth of engagement
- Various levels and categories of participation?
We probably need an org comm person here...
Role of individuals
How do we remain descriptive without becoming to prescriptive?
- Leadership qualities?
- Trendsetter?
- Dynamic personalities?
Leadership functions
- If we can identify some leadership functions, we may find them in a variety of individuals in the group
- e.g., story-telling, repetition, mental mapping
- Does it connect to genre?
- e.g., story-telling, repetition, mental mapping
Poetics of genre
- Poetics of genre
- Genre of content (SF, Sports, etc)
- Genre of activity (Ito)
Seeking transition, catalyst
- How can we capture information about catalyst?
- Is ethnography the best method?
- Better to use interview?
- Seeking groups prior to their "catalyst moment"
Categories: Youth | Engagement | Civic | Meeting | Popular | Culture | Politics | Media | Pop | Television
