The subtext of this article, I suppose, is that I think cultural researchers could benefit from a broader understanding of what “counts” as research. In communication and media studies, at least, I think a lot of scholars and editors have grown gradually more accustomed to the idea that “virtual ethnography”—studying a culture via the internet, as opposed to in person, for extended periods of time—has its place. Even within this subset of research practice, though, I think it’s important to remember that people develop a sense of culture online in ways that go beyond posting to forums and mailing lists, which is what most online ethnographies I’ve read have focused on. I drew on that kind of thing in my own research, of course, but the web is a big place, and what goes on online doesn’t necessarily stay online. “Culture” is sometimes bigger than any one community of people, and a broader approach to online research can offer new perspectives on that.

My own approach to “ethnographic blogging,” then, involved surfing the web just to see where it would take me, writing blog posts on the off chance that others would comment on them and link to them (thus giving me more sites to read via trackbacks), and using info from online communities to locate suitable “offline” communities to study. (That’s in addition to all the “normal” participant observation and interviews I conducted, of course.) It probably seems haphazard and unscientific to many other researchers, but I suppose I’m the kind of researcher who tends to publish in journals with “Science” in the name only when accompanied by words like “Cultural.” Actually, I got the sense that one of this article’s editors thought my approach might have been too systematic, as I chose certain websites as “starting points” for my online meanderings. From a practical perspective, though, I’m not sure how else you’d start, and I did my best to include a range of starting points, representing a variety of concepts of what it means to be a geek. Some of them I still follow; others were invaluable to me as a researcher, but turned out not to be my cup of tea for personal reading.

I know the title “Ethnographic Blogging” may kind of imply that the blog itself is the ethnography, much as with ethnographic filmmaking. Alas, no—the title just occurred to me as a way to describe my weird hybrid of methodological approaches. Somewhere deep down, though, I harbor a (now not-so-secret) hope that somebody will eventually make an ethnographic blog in the truest sense—or that it’s already been made, and I just haven’t found it yet. Would it just read like a serialization of an ethnographic manuscript? Or would you get to know a culture day by day, post by post, alongside a researcher? How would future readers even navigate it and make use of it? I’ll leave that to someone else to ponder for now. To be honest, I wonder how long it will take for blogs to start to seem dated as a format, given how many internet studies focused on “multi-user domains” in the ’90s, as if those were the wave of the future. (Though you’d be surprised how well some of their results hold up in other online environments today.)

In the meantime, if you spot (or practice!) any kind of ethnographic blogging, please do send me a link. I’d love to know that this isn’t just limited to one nerdy dissertation experiment.

I think it sounds neat—and, much to my surprise, so do most of those offering comments on Chronicle, it seems. A former student of the class also chimed in to offer some positive reflections and a link to her course blog, which links to other students’ blogs. That should give a sense of the conversations that these technologies encouraged.

In unrelated news, I have about a dozen drafts for new posts that I am dying to complete and post, but they’re going to have to remain drafts until I push through some of my real (i.e., deadline-bound) work. Blogging is my own personal “disruptive technology,” I suppose (but usually in a good way). I expect to be posting a lot come August, the month I defend.

Sexist, racist, and homophobic sentiments may be amplified by the somewhat anonymous and depersonalized format of internet venues – an “online disinhibition effect” (Suler, 2004) in psychological terms, though well known to geeks under such terms as “the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” (Kruhulik & Holkins, 2004).

The phrase is indeed well known, and I offer an endnote to expound upon that a bit. But it still looks like a weird sentence. (And yes, the lowercase “I” in “internet” is intentional.)

My dilemma today is how to cite an article by Iroquois Pliskin. Citing people by handle/screen name is usually no big deal for me. Because I’m quoting heavily from comments on blogs and publicly viewable forums, I already have plenty of citations like “(CmdrTaco, 2007).” This gets trickier when citing someone using a screen name that takes the form of a pen name. If I’m to treat this like a screen name, I’d cite it as “(Iroquois Pliskin, 2009).” On the other hand, this has a first and last name, so should it be “(Pliskin, 2009)”? “Mark Twain” was just a pen name for Samuel Clemens, but I think you’d still cite him as “(Twain, 1876).” And I haven’t even addressed how I decided to cite the Penny Arcade strip noted in the quote above as “(Krahulik and Holkins, 2004)” rather than “(Gabe and Tycho, 2004)”; citing when you have a screen name and a real name associated with a work presents its own challenges as well.

I’m not going to let something so silly hold me up right now, so I’m just going with citing as a screen name for consistency with the other online sources I’m using in cases when no real name is given on the work itself. Perhaps I’ll revise after defending if need be.

What’s got me blogging now is a funny coincidence: Just as I was commenting to my friend and fellow Annenberger Moira about the concept of “digital natives” needing some revamping (if not outright rejecting), she pointed me to “Generational Myth,” an article in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Ed by Siva Vaidhyanathan. (Link updated to direct to the free version—thanks, Siva!) The long and the short of the article is precisely what I have been observing in my own class: The generation of “digital natives” might not be so native to the digital as many presume, and is certainly not so homogeneous as to be able to be described by a single way of thinking across the board.

Some key excerpts:

College students in America are not as “digital” as we might wish to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough. All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won’t read books are just not true. Our students read books when books work for them (and when I tell them to). And they all (I mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book to the PDF or Web page. What kids, like the rest of us, don’t like is the price of books. [...]

By focusing on wealthy, white, educated people, as journalists and pop-trend analysts tend to do, we miss out on the whole truth. [...]

[Esther] Hargittai explained why we tend to overestimate the digital skills of young people: “I think the assumption is that if [digital technology] was available from a young age for them, then they can use it better. Also, the people who tend to comment about technology use tend to be either academics or journalists or techies, and these three groups tend to understand some of these new developments better than the average person. Ask your average 18-year-old: Does he know what RSS means? And he won’t.”

Agreed.

What got me thinking about all this was teaching applications in the Adobe Creative Suite to seniors in college. I expected that they would not know how to use Photoshop, but that they would be proficient with basic document editing in Microsoft Windows. I was mistaken. They certainly know how to open a web browser to access Facebook, a webmail client, and Google Image Search, but the interfaces that serve up such applications seem alien to them.

In teaching Photoshop, I was getting questions like, “How do I resize a window so that I can see the other windows behind it?” Photoshop uses the same window resizing rules as any other Windows application: minimize/maximize buttons near the “close” button in the upper right corner of each window, and a space to click and drag to resize in the lower right corner. I believe I answered this question for no fewer than 10 students (out of 60, between three sections), and those are only the ones who spoke up to ask.

Another question that came up comparably frequently: “How come it keeps pasting the thing I pasted before?” The answer is that you need to copy something new in order to paste something new, and many students thought it was sufficient just to select the new thing they wanted to paste. Again, this works no differently from any other program in Windows. I also noted that the majority of students in my classes go to the Edit menu for common functions like copying and pasting—sometimes hunting around in the menu to find them—rather than using keyboard shortcuts.

And, for what it’s worth, they certainly don’t prefer clicking back and forth between Adobe applications and the PDFs I give them for handouts (in my perhaps misguided attempt to save a tree). These students are not ready to give up their paper media, and I certainly don’t blame them.

These are not dumb students: They have asked some good questions and have come up with some clever visual solutions to the projects I lay out for them. Several are also very enthusiastic and quite excited to learn such programs: A number have commented to me that this is like nothing they’ve ever done before, that they could fool around with these programs for hours, that this is now their favorite class. I honestly don’t think that has as much to do with me as it does with getting to learn some truly useful skills and practice with some surprisingly usable tools.

I would also echo Siva’s repeated insistence that “digital nativism” is more of an economic issue that some writers typically recognize. I don’t think these students are “poor,” per se, but chatting with one student last night after class helped put things into perspective for me. She mentioned that she had transferred to this school from another college (about a mile away) because of the steep tuition at the other place. She was glad, she said, to learn these design programs now because they seemed more commonly known and less commonly taught for beginners at her old school. (The class I’m teaching now isn’t a design class for art majors, but a required course teaching basic design literacy for all Communication and Journalism students.)

Of course, I’m not going to say there’s no truth to the idea that increased access to digital technology has changed the way that young people think about communication and information. As I said, these students are perfectly capable with Google Image Search, and that certainly changes the way that they approach a design project compared to how design students would have approached such a project 20 years ago. But my experiences teaching have made me curious to read (and perhaps conduct, after the dissertation) some research about how well college students really understand visual digital interfaces—or, perhaps, which interfaces they truly understand.

I wonder, for example, whether the applications that the average college student understands most intuitively are web apps more so than the browsers and operating system windows used to navigate to them. Has the operating system interface become so transparent, with so much of interaction moved to the content of the individual application, that simple, more or less universal functions like “Ctrl-C” and window minimizing now seem acceptable to ignore?

I suspect that someone else has already written on this, so I plan to hunt around in some journals before I muse much further on it. I just felt the need to make a note of this before I get caught up in teaching Illustrator and InDesign, and some other anecdote gets me thinking about something else entirely. As many have warned me, teaching can be as much of a learning experience for the instructor as it is for the students.

Anonymous vs. Scientology: A couple months back, Henry Jenkins hosted an extremely interesting and link-filled post by an unidentified graduate student at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, detailing a group of internet pranksters’ battle against the Church of Scientology.

The group, which was born from sites such as 4chan (itself founded by communities born from Something Awful) goes by “Anonymous” (as in, anonymous forum posting). Such forumgoers were at first content to post LOLcats and throw around some porn, but got into the habit of defacing or shutting down sites they considered stupid. This all came to a head when the Church of Scientology attempted to shut down a Gawker post for featuring an internal video. Despite the lack of any clear leadership, Anonymous focused its energy on attacking Scientology for attempting to suppress free speech on the internet. Their (admittedly successfully frustrating) methods caught the attention of the “Old Guard” of Scientology protesters, who were impressed but saw the pranking as unproductive. Rather than lashing out at this group too, Anonymous actually enshrined one such critic as a meme (“Wise Beard Man”) and refocused efforts on his suggestion of trying to destroy the church’s tax-exempt, non-profit status. This led to some rather colorful, widespread protests (check out some photos).

Just before reading this post, I had come across one such protest myself, here in Philadelphia. (Sadly, I did not have my camera on me.) What struck me about it was just how delightfully geeky the protesters were, decking out their signs (and themselves) in the imagery of video games, comic books, and internet references. Examples from various protests include signs proclaiming Scientology an “ePIC FAIL” and directing passers-by to google a controversial story, and plenty of protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks, as recently popularized by the movie adapted from Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta comics (though you do get occasional other kinds of geeky masks). From where I stood, the protesters decked out in costumes and t-shirts bought from Threadless and comic book stores made it look like an unusually rowdy segment from Comic Con International.

The grad student behind the post suggests how this phenomenon offers a number of opportunities for academic research, and offers some additional links and citations for further consideration. Interestingly, the Anonymous members who comment on the post seem to tend to agree that the phenomenon bears study, and offer some additional suggestions and food for thought.

The (Other) Flying Penis Attack: You may remember when the self-proclaimed “Second Life Millionaire” was attacked by (virtual) flying penises during an interview with CNet. But had you heard of the offline follow-up at a Russian political assembly?

It seems that some pro-Kremlin activists attempted to disrupt Garry Kasparov’s speech with a, um, peniscopter, I guess you could call it. Game Politics has a summary and some video, with additional quotes from the Sydney Morning Herald report. Waxy has some side-by side pictures and videos for comparison. That last post raises the question of whether the protesters even realized they were mimicking Second Life, but that seems an oddly specific sort of distractor.

From a personal standpoint, I’m not sure what it is that I find so fascinating about these forms of protest. I mean, people use the internet to organize politically all the time, right? Why is it that these seem to me like a separate phenomenon from making a Flash game to make fun of rival presidential candidates, or using Meetup to organize a rally? Perhaps I see those as events that allow mainstream culture to effectively exercise politics using the internet—but the events noted above feel like “internet culture” bringing its politics (and sometimes shocking flair for the dramatic) out of the niches and into plain sight.

At Sciencewoman, for example, Alice Pawly describes the article as “problematic”:

I’m glad women feel like they can dress how they want, look “girly” and all. … I just challenge that now women are experiencing a simple choice for how to display themselves, and that they just happen to choose to do so in hegemonically feminine ways.

And over at Salon, Catherine Price expresses her own mixed feelings:

My confusion … stems from the fact that the Nerd Girls video makes it seem like sexual appeal is a necessary component to being part of their group. …

[P]erhaps the Nerd Girls aren’t as all about their sexuality as the video makes it seem. I certainly hope that’s the case — ideally, we’d convey to young women that they shouldn’t be afraid to be into science even if they aren’t holding down part-time modeling gigs, and that there’s more than one definition of what it means to be “hot.”

The commenters on those posts seem divided on how much of a problem it is that the nerd girls promote “hegemonic femininity.” And, as Catherine notes, it’s hard to say how much of this is actually relevant to the group.

Gizmodo, meanwhile, doesn’t offer much editorializing. Its (mostly male) commenters, on the other hand, occasionally offer some friendly or critical notes, but mostly either hostile or blatantly sexist interpretations, from what I saw:

Ferg1 at 11:06 PM on 06/15/08
no thank you

smcallah at 11:10 PM on 06/15/08
I don’t like when people try to act like a nerd. Because god damn it, I was born a nerd, and I went through school in the 80′s as a nerd, not a great time to do so.

So I get uppity when someone who appears to have never gone through middle and high school being considered a nerd suddenly wants to say she’s a nerd.

Hello_Newman at 12:06 AM
It’s just a normal picture of young women casually dressed and not a photo shoot. Cut them some slack, I think we’re too used to booth babes dressed to the nines, this is what nerds look like. I’m sure if it was a story about women who go out to night clubs they’d look a lot hotter, but it’s not.

cubensis at 01:43 AM
I’d hit #2, #6 and #7.

I put the link there in case the post goes back online, but at last check, the post was deleted. I like being able to refer back to comments for research, though, so it’s a good thing I was able to find it in my Safari cache and print a PDF of the basic text and images, sans CSS formatting. (Thanks, Retrospective!)

I can see why some people are wary of the Nerd Girls’ approach; the reaction among many Gizmodo commenters is a neat demonstration of how some nerdy men will respond to sexualized nerds (especially with the veil of anonymity). And, of course, there’s the danger that the ladies who don’t have self-esteem about their looks will fear that majoring in engineering will compound their social woes.

That said, from the perspective of social psychology research, promoting female nerds as possessing feminine sexuality may actually be an effective (if not ethically unproblematic) means of shifting nerd stereotypes. According to some research (which I hope I can be forgiven for not digging up right now), stereotypes are linked in our minds. Someone who believes that young black men are criminals, for example, would also be likely to believe that such men are natural athletes, have good rhythm, etc. If you present such a person with an example completely atypical of their mental construction of the group—e.g., a young black man who is shy, unathletic, and good with computers—that person will conclude that your example is an exception to the rule. If you only tweak the stereotype slightly, however, such as by presenting said person with a young black man who is into basketball, freestyle rapping, and studying medicine, you have a better chance of getting a prejudiced person to reconsider the belief that young black men are criminals.

One actual example of this strategy, if I remember correctly from my Social Psych class a few years back, involved an ad campaign for women’s soccer which promoted the women as both athletic and sexy. This is basically what the Nerd Girls are (purported to be) going for. This takes on an added sense of urgency, perhaps, considering that the “unsexy” stereotype may actually be part of what steers girls and women away from studying engineering in the first place. That’s one of David Anderegg’s biggest concerns in Nerds: Who they are and why we need more of them. Adolescents and post-adolescents are especially concerned about seeming sexually desirable, and this plays a role in the career choices they’re considering around the same time.

I hope I covered my back enough by acknowledging how problematic this strategy is, if that’s really how the Nerd Girls are promoting themselves. I suppose it raises the question, then, of which stereotype demands greater resistance from a group of female engineers: the idea that women should be attractive according to traditional norms of femininity, or the idea that nerds can’t be women? I’d like to think that any one person can resist both of these in her own life if she so chooses, but that is different from making a unified, public statement to gradually prod a stereotype into a slightly more acceptable direction.

Perhaps, though, going for “nerds are sexy” is overshooting a bit. The nerd stereotype is still bad enough in the eyes of many that asserting that “nerds are attractive” really doesn’t take much more than pointing out: “Look, we bathe regularly (and we’re getting much better at noticing that your eyes glaze over when we start talking about Battlestar Galactica).”

Games & Culture. The first panel of the weekend for me was one of those I most looked forward to, and not just because two of my Annenberg compatriots were presenting. As it turned out, though, their papers were particularly interesting to me.

Adrienne Shaw, presenting on “Putting the Gay in Games,” discussed the representation (or general lack thereof) of homo- and bisexual characters in video games. As one audience member pointed out (and as Adrienne has addressed in a recently revised version), there are of course plenty of players who will read queer relationships into games, but this really isn’t any substitute for having that built into the narrative.

Adrienne’s argument may make some roll their eyes—those who don’t fully understand systematic social and cultural marginalization may complain that video games are no place for politics, but even concerned queer gamers have countered that calls for representation for its own sake could too easily lead to tokenism. As Adrienne points out, however, there’s a real storytelling issue here that affects the market for all of us: You don’t have to be G, L, B, or T to think it’d be worth it to have the option to play some characters who are. Personally, playing Mass Effect as a female helped me realize how interesting it is to play a protagonist even slightly outside the normal archetype for science-fiction, action gaming. I’m kind of tired of playing the same heterosexual macho, male, messianic superhero again and again, aren’t you?

In the same panel, Joel Penny presented on “Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and the Ideology of the Military.” This study provided a great example of the multiple appeals of gaming we’ve talked about on this blog, illustrating how different players approach the same games differently. Some players he interviewed reported gaining a greater appreciation of soldiers from World War II video games, and highly valued such games for their historical accuracy and narrative force. Others, on the other hand, were so much more concerned with gameplay mechanics and weaponry/toys over other elements that they dismissed WWII as boring.

I’d be quite interested to see how players understand the experience of playing Axis soldiers in games that allow you to do so. (I remember a conversation at Penny Arcade, awhile back, surrounding Gabe’s grandfather, a WWII vet, not understanding why anybody would want to do this.) Perhaps this only comes up in multiplayer situations when gameplay is at the forefront of people’s minds, and “Axis” and “Allies” are as neutral as “red” versus “blue,” with no concern for narrative implications. Still, chatting with some friends about this, I found it interesting how people noted that new World of Warcraft players tend to skew towards the “good” (“Alliance”) races instead. It’s one thing to have a hard time actually committing evil actions in a game gives you the option to do so, and subsequently recognizes your character evil or “renegade” (like Mass Effect and certain Star Wars games). But it’s an even greater testament to the narrative power of games, I think, if characteristics of the avatar and its backstory are sufficient to guide what a player feels comfortable doing with that character.

Incidentally, my youngest brother text messaged me during this 9:00 AM panel to brag that he beat “Psychobilly Freakout” on Expert level on his first try, and then “Free Bird” on his third try, in Guitar Hero 2. Clearly, “Game Studies” runs in the family.

Media Literacy and the Health and Well-Being of Children. Ever since doing a literature review on how communication researchers understand the term ‘media literacy’ for a class a few years back, I’ve had an ongoing personal interest in the topic, and I’ve been looking forward to discussing it more as I teach. One branch of media literacy researchers in communication is particularly concerned with staging “interventions”—videos, workshops, or entire curricula—designed to teach children about how media work, with the hopes of enabling children to critically assess and perhaps produce their own visual messages. Most such curricula that I’ve read about stress that television ads are designed to convince you to buy something and that food packaging is actively misleading, but stop short of telling students not to buy any particular toys or foods.

Ever since I wrote that media literacy lit review, I’ve had one lingering concern: Media literacy interventions test for learning, but not for effects. I think it should not surprise us that if you teach one class some stuff about media, and then test them later on the course material, they’ll do better at the test than the control group who doesn’t get a class. What I want to know, though, is what skills this translates to outside of a test-taking, classroom setting. Seeing as how such curricula seem to get government funding at least in part due to claims that they provide children with psychological resistance to misleading ad messages—a public health concern, as the panel of this title indicates—I’ve been dying to see a study that actually tests whether these curricula actually have that effect.

This panel provided just that study, and the result was even more cleverly and robustly designed than I’d imagined. Ariel Chernin, a recent Annenberg graduate, presented a paper co-written with her advisor, Bob Hornik, which tested two things: Can an instructional video teach kids that commercials are meant to persuade you, and if so, does being taught about persuasive intent make kids less susceptible to persuasion?

The previous presentation on the panel, by Cynthia Scheibe, offered some evidence that young children can be taught about persuasive intent, contrary to the claims of some developmental psychologists and anti-advertising advocates. Ariel’s presentation offered additional evidence for this, showing a bit of the video that kids watched, which explained rather plainly that ads are trying to make you buy stuff. (The control group got a video with Bill Nye talking about plants.) Two weeks later, the kids came back to watch a cartoon with a commercial break, and answered a number of questions so they wouldn’t be aware they were specifically being questioned about ad content. And, contrary to the assumptions of media literacy researchers and instructors, the group that saw the video was actually more persuaded by the advertising than the group that didn’t.

This may have just been an effect of priming (or some related psychological phenomenon), whereby the kids who saw the video had been thinking more about advertising already (even after two weeks!), and so ended up paying more attention to ads. It wasn’t the result I was expecting, though, and certainly wasn’t the result most media literacy researchers expect, so it was all rather exciting for me.

Respondent Renee Hobbs, a well-known media literacy researcher, noted that this panel shows that media literacy is now out of its “infancy” and into its “toddlerhood,” and remarked that it’s important for media literacy curricula to be more wide-ranging in its messages—not just telling kids “commercials make you want to buy stuff,” but also teaching production skills, for example. I wonder, though, if the effects of an entire curriculum might just be deeper and longer-term than the effects of a single video, like the one Ariel showed. And, of course, we need to ask whether resistance to persuasion should be the prioritized goal of media literacy education, or whether the potential of increased susceptibility to ad messages is a small price to pay for learning other skills and information. It would be interesting to see whether a (relatively) short-term effect of increased susceptibility to mediated persuasion during childhood actually translates into (variously positive or negative) ongoing effects down the line. What if the kids getting media literacy education are a little more easily persuaded now, but much more media-savvy and critical as adults, thanks to the head start? All in all, I see a lot of interesting possibilities for additional research in this area.

The Impact of Visual Communication: Networking the Power of the Visual and Visual Communication Studies Division Business Meeting and Game Studies Special Interest Group Business Meeting. The first of these meetings was a roundtable session that sought to question and best understand the points of commonality and complements between the various disciplines implied in “visual communication studies.” The second was a discussion about that division’s past, present, and (projected) future membership. The third was about an entirely different division, discussing at times what its own membership could agree upon. For me, the resulting discussions were interesting not only for what they set out to discuss, but just as much for what they got me thinking about: namely, how academic communities of knowledge arrange themselves.

Conferences like ICA are organized into divisions (e.g., Mass Communication) and special interest groups (SIGs, e.g., Game Studies). Divisions, by virtue of having more members, are allowed to host more panels, and get more funding from the association. The upshot of this system is that SIGs are generally trying to get approved as divisions, and divisions are trying to maintain membership so they don’t get bumped back to SIGs. Meanwhile, there’s a debate surrounding whether it should be more difficult to start up new SIGs, perhaps because the existing divisions are concerned that having so many new SIGs dilutes membership among existing divisions. Those in favor of allowing relatively easy SIG startup, on the other hand, contend that new SIGs are often the hotbeds for the creative thinking and new ideas in the field at large.

I’m still too new to ICA to comment on this very intelligently, but from what I have seen so far, it’s important to make a distinction between starting new SIGs for the purpose of fostering new ideas, and starting new SIGs that replicate the function of existing divisions. There is a lot of the latter going on in some other academic organizations, surrounded by gossipy tales about political rifts between administrators. I haven’t really noticed this at ICA, though. New SIGs include groups like Game Studies, which often studies media in ways completely ignored by other communication researchers and theorists. (Outside this division, the only papers about games tend to stick to studying whether they make kids violent or whether they can be used to teach lessons about health.) I think it will be a great day when modes of thinking circulating in Game Studies have percolated into the field at large enough that a separate group for just this medium won’t be needed anymore—but for now, it is serving an important purpose.

It can be tricky for some divisions and SIGs to feel like they’re competing for members. I think one short-term solution, at least, would be to host more poster presentations at conferences like ICA. This year’s acceptance rate was a bit low for a conference of this type, I think, at about 43% overall. Visual Communication Studies could particularly benefit from an increased number of poster sessions, given the nature of what folks are presenting. I might have preferred one myself to a high-density session, though there could be a note when people submit about whether one’s presentation is likely to include moving images that would work better projected from a computer. I do applaud ICA for attempting to make poster sessions feel less like the conference ghetto, with such efforts like the cash prize for best poster.

That’s just my two cents for now, anyway. I imagine I’ll mull on this further as I get more deeply involved with certain divisions and attend more conferences.

Digital Mediations of Personal Narratives. This panel discussed “digital storytelling” insofar as online scrapbooking, Facebook, MySpace, and other such services constitute the construction of “personal narrative” online. It should be no surprise, perhaps, that I have more to say now about what I read between the lines than about the original papers themselves (though I do recommend downloading the original papers if you are an ICA member).

During audience Q&A, someone raised a question about what “storytelling” really means. As I’ve alluded to elsewhere on this blog, storytelling and narrative are hotly contested terms in certain disciplines, and referring to a Facebook page as a “narrative” is bound to raise some hackles. I’m comfortable enough, though, with the idea of a “personal narrative” as distinct from an “authorial narrative” (or whatever you call those stories actually intentionally structured as stories), so I’ll leave that debate aside.

What really interested me was the implied follow-up question: What’s so “digital” about “digital storytelling”? I plan to revisit the broader question behind this—what we mean in communication research and theory when we discuss “digital” media—in a paper for next year’s ICA (if not sooner), which will be be investigating the theme of “keywords in communication.” For now, though, I’d just like to throw out a couple quick thoughts.

When we discuss “digital storytelling” with regard to Facebook—or even other web applications that more readily lend themselves to traditional narrative, such as Blogger and WordPress—the “digital” part refers largely to advances in ease of production and transmission. Because digital messages are easily and quickly transmitted over long distances, and simultaneously accessible and copyable from multiple points, it’s relatively quick and cheap for producers to create media and share it widely. For some media forms that actually do seek audiences, such developments do, of course, lead to advances for the consumer as well. Notably, this includes potentially less expensive products (thanks to the lower overhead for producers), and a broader array of consumables to choose from (thanks to the enlarged market of newly-enabled producers).

Contrast this with how we might understand “digital storytelling” in a medium like video games. Here, “digital” does not necessarily invoke images of democratization among producers and the related broadening of markets with countless niches to choose from. We can see this somewhat at work with Flash games and “casual games,” perhaps, but, for the most part, this kind of digital storytelling has yet to be as fully automated; interaction with the code of programs is still at the forefront of considerations for content creators. The “stories” told by amateurs in digital form are still pretty easily distinguishable from the stories told by professionals backed by giant studios, despite how well text-based websites may have blurred this line for books, and online video may have blurred it for film. And, while the internet does indeed broaden access to downloadable and web-based games, these are not necessarily the best representations of “digital storytelling”—computer and console games that are still locked down with DRM and sold via retail do not really match our other understanding of “digital” as connected to the speed and ease of use of the internet.

These are just a couple preliminary thoughts for a more in-depth project, of course, inspired by works like Krippendorff’s metaphors of communication, Downes and McMillan’s article on defining interactivity, and Sterne’s book chapter questioning what’s “digital” in digital music. I’m pretty excited about next year’s ICA theme; leave it to incoming president Barbie Zelizer (Annenberg’s “Raymond Williams Professor of Communication”) to encourage researchers and theorists to collaboratively compile an updated Keywords for the field.

Visuals From an Artistic Perspective. As for my own session at this conference, I presented a paper on experimental comics and visual language alongside presentations about architecture, ethonographic/art films, the photography of Jacob Riis, and electronic color techniques from years past. It was an interesting mix, but I didn’t really get a chance to mull over the conceptual bridges between these because there is no Q&A following such “high density” sessions.

For my own part, at least, I wish I hadn’t lost the last two pages of my notes immediately before my presentation, but I think I recovered gracefully enough. (Hopefully nobody minded me announcing, “And now we reach the uncharted territory of me presenting without my notes,” as a means of gathering my wits and my nerve for the final stretch.) One very pared down version of the paper has already been submitted for journal review, but if you’re interested, you can download the presentation slides and the notes (including the last two pages!) here.

One thing I never really had time to get into in either the presentation or the paper is the contrast between the development of the conventions of comic books and video games. In this paper, you see, I argue that feelings of cultural marginalization have led alternative comic artists to experiment with the basic formal conventions of the medium, rallied behind a common notion of comics as a “visual language,” or, similarly, as “sequential art.” This is a particularly ahistorical understanding of the medium, actively discounting single-panel works traditionally known as comics (like Family Circus and The Far Side) in favor of a formal definition that still leaves lots of possibilities for diverse work. Some comic artists have gone even further, trying to actively cut themselves off from other traditional comics material like superhero stuff, happy to call their work by other terms entirely to suggest different artistic pretensions (e.g., graphic novels).

Video game theorists, so far as I can tell, have attempted no similar feat of rallying behind a common definition that cuts out any “unwanted” crowd. This is interesting to me, as there’s a great deal more formal disparity within this medium than within comics. The line between your average alternative comic and your average superhero comic is significantly less blurry than the line between your average puzzle game and your average video RPG, but at least one journalist still boldly proclaimed at one point that “Maus is not a comic book.” How hard (or even desirable) would it be, I wonder, for some like-minded groups of game designers to suddenly proclaim that they’re working on “progressional art”? Games without a player-guided narrative progression simply wouldn’t count as part of their artistic movement anymore, and the stated goal of this movement would be to explore all the different things one could do with “progression” as the one formal constant to experiment around.

Would we see something like we’ve seen with comics in recent years? The break between these sides of the medium hasn’t been permanent, or even very long-lived. Superhero comics have been welcomed back into the fold of the “graphic novel” shelf eventually, of course, but the break in between arguably gave alternative and art comics the space they needed to get mainstream magazines, book stores, and libraries thinking of the medium as worthy of adult attention. It’s possible that video games would benefit similarly from such a movement, but it’s hard to imagine such a move happening. As my paper presented at ICA argues, after all, this was largely able to happen in comics because of the influence of a few, particularly high-profile creators who were pretty much able to do the work to prove their point, relatively free of the pressures upon more profitable media. There are some influential game designers, of course, but games are much more collaborative products, and the market is much more demanding of blockbusters.

This is the argument I wanted to make in a paper, but it requires so much background knowledge that to get into the nuances of it, I’d need to write one to two other papers first. Such are the minor annoyances of academic brevity, I suppose. And brevity, as this post surely indicates, is a condition from which I have clearly never suffered.

Defining the American Nerd: Salon has an interview with Ben Nugent, author of American Nerd: The Story of My People. (Thanks to Paul for the link.) Our respective approaches to considering the place of the geek/nerd in American culture differ somewhat, but I have ben fascinated to read more about the points where our conclusions align. I wonder, too, how readers here would respond to his definition of what all nerds—from computer programmers to Society for Creative Anachronism folks—have in common: “a love of rules, a love of hierarchies that were meritocratic and open to everybody, and in some cases the affectation of rationalism.”

On a personal note, I also found it funny when Ben remarks that “I’m probably the one person on planet Earth who might have to affect nerdiness as part of their professional life.” I similarly keep getting the “Are you a geek?” question and I’m never quite sure how to answer. I certainly think I am, but I have known geeks who would disagree (because I don’t build/program/live in my own computer). Plus, the people who ask me are generally the people I wouldn’t normally act geeky around—something I only realized about myself after months of studying how others understand what it means to be a geek.

Breaking into Geekdom: Austin 360 (the web presence of the Austin American Statesman) has an interview with a hometown geek done good, Scott Porter, star of the recent Speed Racer movie. (Thanks to Church for the link.) What I found most interesting was how there may be a mild hurdle for a guy who played football (and played a football player, in Friday Night Lights) to get accepted among the Hollywood geek elite:

The weird thing is now that it’s becoming popular there’s this huge backlash and everybody’s really testing each other to see if you’re a true geek or a true nerd. I passed the test — the Wachowskis kind of ribbed me for a little bit. I don’t know if it’s because of the fact that I played football in high school or the characters I play or the way I look, but a lot of people tend to not believe that I’m as into it [comics/sci-fi] as I am.

Virtual Therapy, Real Gains: I was completely fascinated by this New Yorker article about “Virtual Iraq,” a Full Spectrum Warrior VR mod customizable for treating soldiers with post-traumatic stress. (Special thanks to Chop Shop, my local haircut joint, for leaving out something in the waiting area other than fashion magazines for a change.) The article does a pretty good job of explaining how this is used very carefully as a tool for therapy, and what psychological processes it engages. I was most interested, though, to read the very important cultural strength behind this, as it offers a method of therapy that lacks the stigma of seeing a “shrink.” As one soldier explains:

Infantry is supposed to be the toughest of the tough. Even though there was no punishment for going to therapy, it was looked down upon and seen as weak. But V.R. sounded pretty cool. They hook you up to a machine and you play around like a video game.

That same soldier admitted later in the article (anonymously) that he cried after every session.

One could argue that there’s a more widespread gain to be made by removing the weak or non-masculine stigma of therapy, rather than catering to those who can’t get over that stigma. That doesn’t do much good for people who are suffering right now, though, and I wonder if treatments like this might be a way of getting the hardest-to-convince populations thinking about therapy in new ways. Of course, I’ve made pretty much the same argument about how making formally unusual comics and video games can shift stigmas related to those media among non-geek audiences, so take from this what you will.

Not Interested in Unlocking the Clubhouse After All: The Boston Globe has an article commenting on recent research suggesting that the major reason for the gender gap in the sciences and technology professions may just be that this is what women prefer, and our society allows greater freedom to follow personal career preferences.

I post this link with the usual caveat that it is not scientific research, but a newspaper article about said research, and may qualify the claims therein less than peer reviewed material would. That said, I’m very curious to learn more about this, as the chicken-or-egg possibilities seem very important to consider. The implication here seems to be that science and tech simply don’t appeal to the innate and more broadly enculturated preferences of American women, but I wonder how well the stereotypes surrounding these fields specifically can be parsed out when studying what people want and believe.

I also think we should question the assumption that working in science and tech means working with “inorganic materials” as opposed to the “organic.” As any programmer can tell you, even the most tech-oriented jobs require working with people at some stage in the game. I wonder if we should be questioning not just why people prefer what they do, but why we conceptualize different fields the way we do. Might we see interests in computer science programs shifting if they offered increased emphasis to communication skills and teamwork exercises in their curricula?

Perceiving Smarts and Popularity: Boing Boing directs us to research at Ohio State University suggesting that kids think peers with glasses are smarter and more honest, but not necessarily any less attractive. One researcher said that “the findings suggest that media portrayals associating spectacles with intelligence may be reinforcing a stereotype that even young children accept.”

Meanwhile, Newsweek reports on research at the University of Virginia that teens can be happy just believing they’re popular, even if they’re not seen as particularly popular by their peers. The kids who are reasonably well liked but not super popular seem to benefit from this, but it doesn’t sound like teens are fooling themselves:

The one group of teenagers who did not fare well socially were those who did not perceive themselves as well liked and were not ranked as popular by their peers. These kids were viewed as more hostile toward their peers as the year went on and they were less sought out by their classmates over time. “They’re not at all on the radar screen,” says McElhaney. “They don’t see themselves as accepted and that’s where it’s most problematic, when you don’t have either that popularity or sense that you’re well liked.”

Perhaps the most practical solution for such teens, implied by another researcher quoted in the article’s final paragraph, is to at least find a small group where one can be accepted.

Makers, Punks, and Geeks: V. Vale at RE/Search has written an essay on the parallels between punk culture and the “maker” culture fostered by Make Magazine and its Maker Faire. As Boing Boing summarizes, shared ideals include DIY, Mutual Aid, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Black Humor.

This is a familiar argument to me, but I’m still trying to piece together for myself a cleaner understanding of the genealogy of this branch of geek culture. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner addresses how hippy/DIY ideals led to the development of the net as we know it. Publishers Weekly said of the book, “On first glance, back-to-the-land hippies and dot-com entrepreneurs might not seem much alike”—but perhaps punk culture is sort of the “missing link” there. (This reminds me that I’m looking forward to reading Christina Dunbar-Hester’s dissertation, which similarly addresses the role of DIY culture and political activism in geek ideals.)

Also through Boing Boing, I came upon this New York Times article on Maker Faire. “This is a real geek fest,” a physics professor quoted in the article remarks, and the article makes note of a couple of the sillier points of the inventions (like cars shaped like muffins).

Noticeably unlike other geek fest articles covered by major newspapers, however—which often leave it to the reader to nod in amusement over weirdos in costume—this article consistently leads the reader back to conclude that this is all A Good Thing. Muffin cars may be weird, but they are “green,” and the overarching message of the festival emphasized here is of the positive uses of technology for humanity.

Is this tone sign of greater respect for geeky pursuits? Maybe. I’m inclined to believe, though, that this is indicative of the socially acceptable geekiness accorded specifically to technology, thanks to its widely understood economic worth. This is, as the author notes, a “high-tech, adamantly nonconformist culture, steeped in engineering and art and innovation in garages that incubate billionaires.” You won’t hear such praise in the Times‘s Comic Con wrap-up this year, even though the attendees of each event may see quite a bit of overlap.

On the Virtues of Steampunk: The New York Times and the Boston Phoenix both recently did pieces on steampunk (and an unedited version of the NYT piece went up here). The NYT piece in particular got me thinking about a couple of things that seem relevant to geek and tech cultures in general.

This article is concerned with “the intersection of romance,” emphasis on explaining the contemporary and subcultural importance of the romance. I’m curious, though, of whether this has broader relevance to how we consider the design of technology. For instance, I was very interested in this comment: “Yes, he owns a flat-screen television, but he has modified it with a burlap frame. He uses an iPhone, but it is encased in burnished brass.” The specific mention of the iPhone suddenly got me thinking about how steampunk may in some ways be another version of the kind of design consistency and holism championed by Apple.

Sure, Apple is all very top-down, steampunk is very DIY, but in both cases, it allows for a unified aesthetic experience between multiple objects in everyday life. The economic realities of mass production mean that a truly unified design aesthetic across multiple product types must necessarily be DIY, or at least rely on a lot of copycatting. Apple doesn’t make video game consoles, but thanks to redefining white and curvy as the color and shape of the future, Nintendo and Microsoft have helped make their electronics fit the contemporary living room aesthetic.

I’m not sure I’m going anywhere with this, but I suppose I’m wondering whether steampunk represents a challenge to other unified design aesthetics (or, to be less charitable, aesthetic monocultures). We’ve been able to “skin” our software applications for years now; will marketers find a way to bring that level of visual customization into other areas of our lives, on a much broader level?

This brings me to the other line I particularly appreciated: “Part of the reason it seems so popular is the very difficulty of pinning down what it is. … That’s a marketer’s dream.” This seems so relevant to the concept of “geek” and “nerd” more generally that I wanted to make note of it for future reference.

The Best Weapons Are Silent: How do you entice the employees of a video game publisher to keep mum on company secrets? Sega’s gamble: motivational posters with ninjas.

The focus in this piece is on how the internet has enabled culture to develop in niches, where people can feel comfortable about reveling in the things they might have otherwise hidden. As one interviewee notes, “Until I launched my company in January, I always kept this part of my life—Internet, humor, in the closet. […] I had no real purpose except to meet kindred spirits.”

It’s more for non-geek audiences, so there won’t be many surprises here for most of you readers. I will say, though, that I found it more respectful than many other newspaper convention pieces (which have a nasty habit of sounding patronizing about the attendees).

Also consider checking out The Weekly Dig‘s ROFLCon-themed issue, available for download online, complete with headlines written in LOLcat/AOL-speak. If nothing else, you may find it kind of funny to see articles that ostensibly have nothing to do with geek culture get so thoroughly web-ified.

I thought I’d share some thoughts on a few of the panels and presentations I saw, including the panel I chaired in the Digital Games division. It’s not representative of everything I saw, and sadly, I had to miss several things I wanted to catch, but that’s the way things are at a big conference with lots of interesting stuff going on.

Gender Studies I: Performing Gender. I met Heather A. Beasley at an earlier panel, and I’m glad I did; my ears perked up when she said something about geek identity. “Witches, Warlocks, Vampires, and Damsels in Distress: Gender Performance in Live-Action Roleplaying” presents an interesting and challenging question: Does pretending to take on certain traditional (even hegemonic) gender roles actually boost geeks’ self-esteem?

As I’ve written about here before, geek identity is marked for many by an active and vocal rejection of certain cultural norms, including “appropriate” behavior based on gender and maturity. Why, then, do we consume so much entertainment media that seems to affirm traditional gender roles, including the ideals of the heroic man rescuing the damsel in distress? Heather’s specifically studying LARPing, but when you think about it, the same question could be applied to any number of geeky “power fantasy” entertainment media. Come to think of it, I think some geeks get a kick out of seeing the normative gender relations thrown out of whack in such media (e.g., playing a game or seeing a movie with a powerful woman who’s not just a sex symbol), but that makes LARPs and RPGs that much more interesting to consider: Why settle on normative gender roles when you make up the story and characters yourself? The answer, according to Heather, may be that it boosts self-esteem outside the game, remaining separate enough from life to encourage reflection on real-world gender relations (though she acknowledges the flip side, the potential danger of reifying stereotypes). This project is just getting started, so I’ll be interested to keep up with it.

Television I: Gender and Identity. Amber Botts gave a presentation titled “Nerds and Geeks and Slackers … Oh My? Chuck, The Big Bang Theory, and Reaper’s Geek Chic Romantic Heroes.” It was nice to hear someone outside of blogs and Wired magazine acknowledging the slew of recent shows targeting a geek demographic. I especially enjoyed the examples of how such shows cast men in the traditionally “female” role of heterosexual relationships, such as when Chuck (I think?) dances a tango with a woman but needs her to lead (and gets dipped at the end).

Ultimately, Amber suggests that the geeky guys from these shows are being groomed not to keep challenging gender norms, but to show that they can graduate to more traditionally acceptable male roles—if not aggressive “alpha” males, then at least to caring and courageous “beta” males. Is there even a way of depicting a “gamma” male such that audiences know they should feel proud of such a character?

Communications and Digital Culture II: The Mainstream/Data Stream. In “‘We Win at the Internet’: The Definition of Digital Mainstream,” Mirian Greenfield reviewed a successful attempt at Google-bombing a politician’s name to be associated with something vile (something we might call “the santorum model”). Ultimately, though, Miriam rejected this as an example of an idea going “mainstream,” as the success of the Google-bomb didn’t necessarily reflect a broader public consciousness of the issue online (if I understood that right).

This led to an extended exchange among audience members about what “the mainstream” really is on the web. Some suggested that for such an item to be “mainstream” in our culture, it would have to be picked up by other media outlets like newspapers and television. This still leaves the question, however, of whether the web has its own mainstream (recognized among the most dedicated users) much in the same way that “mainstream” comics are much more fantasy-genre-focused than mainstream entertainment in other media. If that’s the case, even this Google-bombing may not qualify: It’s just gaming the system, not necessarily representing web-public opinion. I thought it was an interesting conversation, anyway.

Digital Games V: Drugs and Violence. I also got to chair a panel with Jason Farman and Cynthia Nichols. Cynthia (a co-author with Amy Rask and Ian Turnipseed) presented “Video Games: A Potential Influence on Steroid Use Attitudes and Behaviors.” The study found a positive relation between playing Blitz: The League, which allows you to medicate players on the fly, and a positive attitude toward steroid use. This sounds more like correlation than causation to me, but what I found particularly interesting was in the broader scope of the survey the authors conducted, which found that college students who spend a lot of time playing games (that aren’t Blitz) tend to be pretty anti-drug. Given all the negative hype around the effects of games, that seems like a result reporters might find story-worthy. There’s arguably some displacement effect—people who are home playing games aren’t out doing drugs—but what I find even more interesting personally is the possibility that this reflects some value or ideal in gamer/geek cultures.

Next, Jason Farman presented “Hypermediating the Game Interface: Grand Theft Auto and the Alienation Effect.” He discussed how Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas could potentially act as a critique on gangster imagery and violent content when the protagonist is dressed up clownishly, forcing the player to reflect on what’s happening on-screen. I wonder if the argument could be taken even further—are all games experienced this way by virtue of the various displays and instructions on screen, breaking the sense of immersion you might get in film? As one audience member pointed out, however, it may be a little too hopeful to suggest that every example of such hypermediation is designed to (or successful at) getting people to reflect on narrative content. Personally, I wonder how common such reflection is beyond folks like Jason and myself, who can’t help but think really hard about the games we play because that’s part of the fun for us.

And as for me, I presented “Getting 1UP on Death: Failure and Consequences in Narrative Video Games” (which I’m soon submitting to a journal, following some revisions and a new title). It’s actually less about violence than about storytelling, suggesting that having to die and retry scenes in narrative games breaks a sense of fictional coherence (building off the ideas of rules, fiction, and coherence proposed by Jesper Juul in Half-Real). I didn’t actually show any slides—I forgot the adapter to my Macbook, didn’t feel like loading things off a thumb drive onto somebody else’s computer, and didn’t really need pictures anyway—but the notes indicate that there are slides, and I tend to post both my presentation notes and slides here, so there you go.

Thanks… And finally, I just wanted to close by offering a few specific notes of thanks. Thanks to Heather Beasley and Jessica “J.M.” Frey (whose presentation on cosplay I missed, unfortunately) for some interesting conversation over Irish pub music. Thanks to Matt Byrnie for meeting up to chat about geek research. Thanks to Jason Farman, Cynthia Nichols, and everyone who asked questions in the audience for making our panel so fun to be at. And thanks especially to Tony Avruch, co-chair of the Digital Games division, for taking the time to give me a lot of practical input.