About to change to wordpress - will importing files work? It requires that I change from ftp-publishing to blogger-publishing, let's see what happens?!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:05 (0) comments

Malene Larsen is a Danish Ph.D. student doing an interesting Ph.d. on "Understanding Social Networking - On Young People’s Use of Social Networking Sites and Online Identity Construction", looking at, for instance, the hugely popular Danish website Arto.

Malene has been blogging (in English) since she started her project in January (thumbs up for that) and has just posted on the variety of perspectives on social networking (software?) and youth, she has come across. A good overview - also to present to students (I'm teaching a course in Digital Culture this fall, very suitable for that for instance).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 19:18 (1) comments

I discovered yesterday that a new book called Second Lives by writer Tim Guest has just hit the off - and online bookstores. It looks like it includes several stories about the "RL" author's adventures in various virtual worlds, incl. interviews with other inhabitants. It's difficult to get a grip of what it is "really" about, but it looks like it's more an essayistic piece of writing and not very academic. But as a piece of virtual gonzo journalism, it might be interesting in itself.

I havent been able to find a proper summary, but here is the review of the book in the Guardian.
And the review on the SecondLifeInsider Blog.

I'd like to note that it is not the first book of this kind: Katie Hafner has written an interesting piece of journalism/research on the life and development of the Well in The Well -A Story of Love, Death, and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community ; and Julian Dibbell has told us about his adventures in My Tiny Life (primarily about LambdaMOO). And there are probably more stories out there that I dont know of.

Update: heh, it turns out that the WoW-guild of which Im a currently passive member is also featured briefly in the Second Lives book. Esther, who has already read the book, notes that on page 329 Guest mentions a "cultural symposia" of academics in WoW: that's actually from a guild meeting which included a lecture by one of us - there is also a screenshot of it!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:58 (1) comments

- according to a survey made by the Danish media company PHD, and described in the Danish newspaper Børsen today. The survey (number of respondents unknown) showed that Danish youth (age 12-20) as of 2006 spends 108 minutes online a day and only 96 minutes in front of the tv. So the web "wins" marginally, but nevertheless an interesting finding. However, as the Head of Research at DR (the national broadcast company in Denmark) points out in the Børsten article, youth spends quite a lot of time online having "tv-experiences", such as watching fun videoclips on youtube (and on the DR website?). So, as I see it, if "tv" as a concept is about format and specific forms of content (visual, moving pictures, up close and personal), perhaps it is more a question of shifting transmission channels (to Joost for instance), not replacing the media experience itself?

Of course, I would have liked to link directly to further information about the survey (wouldnt it be great to known how many of the young people surveyed play WoW or maintain a Myspace or Arto profile?), but nothing is to be found on the website of the PHD company, at which the latest news item is from early February. And have you every tried googling the word "phd" in connection with the word "survey" (also in Danish)? And of all things, why have they chosen to call their "newsletter" "Wired" and hosting it on an extremely slow server?!!! Im not sure PHD's own webcommunication strategy works very well...

Labels: "PHD mediebureau", mediahabits, webuse, youth

# posted by Lisbeth at: 10:09 (4) comments

Interesting discussion going on at Terra Nova: Structuration, Synthetic Worlds-Style: LOTRO and Emotes, with good independent commentary by Esther at Glod'n Epix. Do you need pre-scripted social emotes to help social group behaviour? Are emotes (also as visual animations) necessary to create the experiece of presence in a world? What happens when you dont have emotes available as social handles? All spawned by the apparent lack of greeting emotes (???) in the Lord of the Rings MMOG, that I have yet to test out myself.

Have to think more about it, but I believe emotes was initially invented to make up for the total lack of visual and corporeal clues in the first text-based virtual worlds. Present virtual worlds are explicitly graphic and all avatars have bodies others can see, so perhaps emotes are not as necessary as they once were, as long as players are provided with methods to express themselves with their bodies or to convey emotions. However, if you want to role-play in virtual worlds, I guess some form of emote system is still necessary to convey subtle nuances of thoughts and behaviours, that cannot be expressed in direct speak, prescripted animations, or player-performed visual behaviour? (fyi, by the latter I mean that you can use ordinary movements like running and jumping to also express emotional states by using them in a particular way, combination or context)
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:12 (2) comments

Today, I went to Hillerød to see the exhibition of the works selected for viewing out of the several hundred portraits submitted to the First Nordic Portrait Competition that ran last year. It was engaging to experience the variety of suggestions of what a moderne (self) portrait can look like. One of the works that also by virtue of its digital format really captivated me, was the little piece: Synne which is also available online [just click the link and you go straight to it, it's in Norwegian though]. "Synne" consists of an interactive Flash-piece, small snippets of conversations through digital media (messenger, sms, email) between two people, Synne and Jone, that you click through. "What's so interesting about that?", you think in the beginning, but it turns out towards the end (sorry bout the spoiler) that Synne died shortly after the last message. So suddenly it is also snippets of the last months of someone's life, you've been looking at. It's oddly moving, and thought-provoking, that we are now also able to store so many pieces of the people we love and care about, through digital media. If we want to - and if we think about it in due time...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:41 (1) comments