From September 2005 to June 2006 a team of thirteen scholars at the The University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication explored how new and maturing networking technologies are transforming the way in which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us.

This site documents the process and the results.

jbleecker's blog

Bruno Giussani and Robert Scoble Chat About New Vectors for Networked Publics

This from Bruno Giussani's blog, capturing some legible thoughts on the tension between blogs and conversations. I like these kinds of conversations because they take a bit of the wind out of the blimp of exuberance and give lots of delicious food for thought for creating new kinds of near-future culture-making machines.

Sure, Technorati and others are trying to make it easier to track discussions on specific topics - although they only capture part of the blogosphere and sifting through search results is not very efficient. Trackbacks and tags do help, but trackbacks are not universally implemented and seem to be used less and less, for whatever reason, and tagging is far from being an exact science. Feeds and feedreaders are a great way to manage quantity (Robert keeps track of several hundred feeds, I'm just below 100 and trying to remain there) but don't solve the qualitative problem of locating the next participant in the discussion you launched.

Submitted by jbleecker on February 6, 2006 - 2:42pm

Pew Internet Report — Social Networks

The Pew Internet & American Life Project today released a report
describing how the internet improves Americans' capacity to maintain
their social networks and how they gain a big payoff when they use the
internet to activate those networks to solicit help.

The report is based on two surveys and finds that the internet and email
expand and strengthen the social ties that people maintain in the
offline world. The surveys show that people not only socialize online,
but they also incorporate the internet into their quest for information
and advice as they seek help and make decisions.

Disputing concerns that heavy use of the internet might diminish
people's social relations, the report finds that the internet fits
seamlessly with Americans' in-person and phone encounters. With the help
of the internet, people are able to maintain active contact with sizable
social networks, even though many of the people in those networks do not
live close to them.

The report, "The Strength of Internet Ties," highlights how email
supplements, rather than replaces, the communication people have with
others in their network.

The full report is available at:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/172/report_display.asp

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Submitted by jbleecker on January 25, 2006 - 11:55pm

UC Humanities Research Institute Sympoium — Technofutures

UCHRI Summer Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory
August 14-25, 2006; UC Irvine Campus

The UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) invites applications from scholars — faculty of all ranks and students — wishing to participate in the third annual Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory (SECT).

Deadline
Applications are due, along with a $20.00 application fee, by February 15, 2006.

Program Overview
SECT is an intensive two-week summer program for graduate students and faculty from the UC system and elsewhere, as well as other scholars, professionals and public intellectuals. The Seminar brings together distinguished instructors and a group of 50-60 students to study a pressing issue or theme in contemporary critical theory, in both its "pure" and "applied" modes. SECT is neither exclusively an introductory survey course nor an advanced research seminar. Rather, it is an academy or "laboratory" where students and faculty at all levels of previous experience can study with scholars involved in important and creative theoretical thought. Truly innovative work is of necessity both fundamental and advanced, hence needs to be presented in ways that are simultaneously accessible and challenging for the widest range of scholars. Participants are encouraged to think experimentally and critically, reflecting on prevailing structures of thought while dynamically engaging intellectual inheritances and pushing for theoretical innovations.

Participants in the 2006 Seminar will explore new ways of thinking about and with technology. The two-week Seminar will include paired conversations between technological innovators and experimental humanists, around the many issues that engage the human and the technological. The two-week Seminar will also include demonstrations of new technological devices, classroom applications and scholarly practices. Participants will have opportunities to engage with new digital applications in the context of small-group workshops, large-group social networking exercises and art/technology installations. The objective for SECT III is to broaden the participation of humanists in the transformation of spheres of technological experience.

Conversations with: Julian Bleecker; John Seely Brown; Craig Calhoun; Lisa Cartwright; Cathy N. Davidson; Scott Fisher; Tracy Fullerton; Guillermo Gómez-Peña; Katherine Hayles; Lynn Hershman; Norman Klein; Geert Lovink; Tara McPherson; Michael Naimark; Saskia Sassen; Larry Smarr

Workshop Topics: Wikis; Blogging; Google Jockeying; Creative Commons; New Genres of Digital Scholarship; History of Electronic Literature; Database Narrative; Multimedia Documentary; Distributed Collaboration in the Humanities; Creation of Digital Archives

Performances & Presentations: Beatriz da Costa; René Garcia, Jr.; Guillermo Gómez-Peña; Lynn Hershman; Perry Hoberman; George Lewis; Michael Naimark; Simon Penny

Cost
Application fee: $20.00 (non-refundable) is due at the time of the online application submission. Applications will not be reviewed until the application fee is received.

Registration fee:
$1,750 for the SECT series. The fee includes tuition for the two-week Seminar and daily refreshments. It does not include the cost of housing or meals.

Scholarships:
The UCHRI will make available up to 10 scholarships for full-time registered students covering the full SECT fee. Scholarship awards will be announced by April 15, 2006. Applicants are encouraged to seek funding from their home institutions.

Requirements
One-page statement covering education, relevant publications (if any), background in an area of study relating to the current SECT topic, and reasons for requesting course of study; and abbreviated curriculum vitae (two pages maximum).

More information and registration instructions are available.

Why do I blog this?The topic of figuring out new ways to think with technology is something that is near and dear to my intellectual and creative heart. I'm planning on exhibiting WiFi.ArtCache and a new piece of MobileSocialSoftware at the Symposium, too. So, that'll be exciting. I also like this idea of panels that are two person conversations on a topic — promising way of working through a conceptual or intellectual question.

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Submitted by jbleecker on January 20, 2006 - 6:12pm

"What's Your Social Doing In My Mobile?" UC Irvine Department of Informatics Talk - Friday, January 13

This Friday I will be visiting UC Irvine and giving a talk on Mobile Social Software — some material I've been working on through the Netpublics Research Seminar at the Annenberg Center for Communication.

Title: What’s Your Social Doing In My Mobile? Design Patterns for Mobile Social
Software

Abstract: Making “mobile software

Submitted by jbleecker on January 11, 2006 - 2:06am

Objects That Blog: The Future of Content?

The first few days of February I'll be at Lift, a content on the near future of technology, people and communication. Nicolas Nova and others have organized this conference, together with a workshop on Blogjects — a not particularly clever neologism I came up with for objects that blog. This topic ties into the idea of proximity-based interaction and usage scenarios for mobile contexts, the main theme of the NetMagnet research project I'm working on through the Netpublics seminar. An informed speculation I have is that the future of content creation and dissemination won't just come from people. It will also come from the social world of objects — things that have histories and experiences. A different kind of witness upon the world, and a witness to events that are of interest to the other blogging species — people. Micro local content is one area in which this may be of practical concern. Just this afternoon I had a nice long meeting with Elizabeth Osder at Yahoo Media in Santa Monica. We discussed many things, including how to reward local communities for disseminating news about local sports events. I mean..really local sports events — the little league team scores, for instance. Now, this fits into a larger conversation about the news content ecology, but just taking this particular problem in hand in the context of the Blogject: why don't scoreboards blog?. Sure, it's not a question deserving any measure of brilliance for the asking, but it suggests a (super simple) example of the Blogject. Why are blogging objects interesting? The idea bubbled up as I was reading Bruce Sterling's "Shaping Things". The [w:Spime] — the "thing" in the world that knows itself and is able to tell things around it about itself. RFID is the Paleostine era for Spimes. Blogjects are Spimes that are fluent and legible, so that anyone can read them. Blogjects are meant for humans to read, in human code, not encrypted Arphid data. Blogjects are the prototype framework to experiment, DIY style, with what Spimes can become. The current, upgraded brain of the Aibo blogs, for instance. The motivation here is not just to create objects that blog, as we now understand blogging. But to use the framework of the complete blog social formation as one in which objects participate — first-class — in the entire multipath culture circulation network. That means syndication, layering meaning on content, trackback, etc. There are several Blogject prototype projects on the front burner. One is a Sakura riff called flavonoid, turned around into a U.S. idiolect, focusing on the present day craze with Pedometers. Another is a way to turn device logs into material that's legible to humans. I've already gone on and on about FlightAware, but there are other idioms — for instance, Motion Based, a community-based mobile social software framework that slurps up device track logs and translates them into fitness goals and regimens.

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Submitted by jbleecker on December 29, 2005 - 2:35am

Collocation and Familiar Strangers

I wrote up some reading notes on my research blog on the topic of co-location and the Familiar Strangers theme, brought to the future Mobile Social Software world from Stanley Milgram's work in 1967.

Familiar Strangers is a recurring theme in the mobile designed experience world, particularly since Goodman and Paulos' Familiar Strangers project. It's also topical for a more tragic reason. In 1964 Kitty Genovese was murdered in the middle of a busy apartment courtyard in Queens, New York City. Many people were "witness" to the event — overhearing it — yet did absolutely nothing.

This is the other side to the promise latent within the Familiar Strangers concept: even though we may be amongst lots of familiar strangers, we may not want to become involved in each others' lives. We may have familiarity with the strangers we see, but what are the design implications for that phenomenon in the age of social software? How much do we really want to involve ourselves in the lives of familiar strangers? What are the social practices in which a networked public can comfortably engage through the networks created by mobile, networked terminals? Dating? Sharing? F2F exchanges? Finding someone who speaks your language when in a foreign country?

More..

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Submitted by jbleecker on December 24, 2005 - 6:27am

y.ah.oo

So, what does it mean that yahoo has wrapped del.icio.us into its media cocktail?

While I wouldn't presume to have any special insight into what it means when del.icio.us and the other properties are mixed in the same stew, I might suggest that del.icio.us is, when you invert it, a rich database of individual's (and groups, I supposed) self-authored descriptions of their interests, activities, projects — the whole thing.

Turning this into a way to create useful indices to people for a variety of purposes seems most obvious. Knee jerk purpose says advertising, but I'm betting that clever heads will find a host of more promising kinds of ways to create vibrant enhancements to existing social formations and ways in which culture is circulated amongst networked publics.

More than tagging pages on the web — tagging "my stuff" in the world is still something TBD. Through del.icio.us, I can provide indices through taxonomies and folksonomies to things that are of interest to me, or related to a project. Some inferences can be made about my personality, or the things in which I am engaged. But that's a degree removed from an explicit articulation of who I am, what I have, what I want to get rid of, what I want to share, what I need, etc. Think of what a distributed MySpaces might look like, without the hassle of having to manage yet another social software application.

[via Russell Beattie's Notebook]

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Submitted by jbleecker on December 11, 2005 - 5:48am

New Media and Society

A new issue of New Media and Society is out, with an essay called Cellphones in public: social interactions in a wireless era. It resonates with a number of the themes that came up during yesterday's seminar discussion.

Cellphones provide a unique opportunity to examine how new media both reflect and affect the social world. This study suggests that people map their understanding of common social rules and dilemmas onto new technologies. Over time, these interactions create and reflect a new social landscape. Based upon a year-long observational field study and in-depth interviews, this article examines cellphone usage from two main perspectives: how social norms of interaction in public spaces change and remain the same; and how cellphones become markers for social relations and reflect tacit pre-existing power relations. Informed by Goffman's concept of cross talk and Hopper's caller hegemony, the article analyzes the modifications, innovations and violations of cellphone usage on tacit codes of social interactions.

Submitted by jbleecker on December 8, 2005 - 7:59pm

Nintendog Existentialism

The LA Weekly hits again with a witty explication of the Nintendog and its concomitant cultural phenomenon.

Submitted by jbleecker on December 8, 2005 - 4:06am

An Internet of Things

This is the report that folks have been chit-chatting about for a couple of weeks or so now. The Internet of Things. I just got a copy of the report and went through the first chapter. It resonates with the spime and blogject research vectors. It#039s 100 Swiss Francs — about $78 US. A book budget from the division would be swell..

Why do I blog this? I think an in

Submitted by jbleecker on December 3, 2005 - 4:15am

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