tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-365934162012-01-21T11:20:07.965-06:00Art and Life in the Age of Social NetworkingPaul Jaynoreply@blogger.comBlogger351100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-13389618643174523952007-04-25T09:26:00.000-06:002007-04-25T09:30:50.363-06:00

Thanks to Ryan Thompson for calling my attention to an Open Source podcast devoted to some of the issues I raised in my post below. The show, according to the website, is devoted to exploring the following questions: "Is there anything to learn about the way we use new technologies in this first mass-murder made, as it were, for YouTube? Are mashups and tributes a form of digital catharsis, a

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-83624089788536182802007-04-24T16:44:00.000-06:002007-04-24T16:53:15.232-06:00

While you’ve been working on your presentations and papers I’ve been preoccupying myself with following the media and internet coverage of the killings at Virginia Tech, perusing some of the blogs and websites that have become important for us over the course of the semester, thinking some about where the study of networked public culture fits within the wider framework of cultural studies, and

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-7249773437963727722007-04-17T07:28:00.000-06:002007-04-17T07:41:10.299-06:00

When you need a break from writing your papers you might relax by watching cheddar cheese age at Cheddarvision.tv. Today's New York Times reports that Tom Calver, a cheese maker in England, has installed a web cam above a 44 pound hunk of aging cheese and become an instant media sensation. When you tire of watching the cheese age you can participate in the site's online forum, visit the cheese's

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-30489736723225286252007-04-09T14:45:00.000-06:002007-04-09T15:22:06.724-06:00

Following are some questions to consider for tomorrow night's discussion. As always, feel free to comment ahead of time or post your own questions.Historicizing fan/slash fiction. In her essay, “Fan Fiction in a Literary Context,” Sheenagh Pugh insists on seeing fan fiction as part of a long process of borrowing and recycling in the historical production of literature. We find the same approach

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-57334203555117781782007-04-09T13:34:00.000-06:002007-04-09T13:59:54.112-06:00

We've talked a lot over the course of the semester about the extent to which networked culture is being produced from the bottom up or manipulated from the top down, and how this tension in cultural production online will play out. This came up last week in our discussion of YouTube, which is struggling to balance user-generated content with commercial video sometimes used to market movies. We're

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-29823243104594783502007-04-06T10:13:00.000-06:002007-04-06T10:27:40.047-06:00

Virginia Heffernan, the TV critic for THE NEW YORK TIMES, has an interesting piece in today's paper about the video, "Seven Minute Sopranos," which you can view below. The video, as you can imagine from the title, reviews the entire set of episodes in seven minutes using video clips from the shows and a voice-over narration by the creators (Paul Gulyas and Joe Sabia). Heffernan reports that,

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-51146256336778846312007-04-06T10:12:00.001-06:002007-04-06T10:12:03.125-06:00

The video discussed by Virginia Heffernan in today's NEW YORK TIMES

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-6164343065879102042007-04-06T09:59:00.000-06:002007-04-06T10:06:43.790-06:00

Steve Jones has just called my attention to an interesting new digital academic journal aimed at the humanities. Digital Humanities Quarterly is, to quote the editors, an "open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities." It is commited to: Experimenting with publication formats and the rhetoric of digital authoringCo-publishing articles with

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-8306911897744070842007-04-02T11:28:00.000-06:002007-04-02T22:03:40.941-06:00

One thing I’ve been thinking we should to talk about tomorrow night is how – and why – we ought to incorporate the study of “networked public culture” (especially its traffic in images and video, our current emphasis) into cultural studies as it’s traditionally conceived. This sent me back to During’s Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction because I wanted to review the section on “The

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-51792340253264619682007-03-30T10:16:00.000-06:002007-03-30T12:55:55.953-06:00

For next week's discussion I think we can concentrate our attention on the social networking of the still and video image on two sites, Flickr and YouTube. For Flickr, the Open Source podcast discussion will be central, so please give it a close listen and spend some time at Flickr (if you have the time and inclination to dig deeper, check out the comments posted on the Photography 2.0 podcast

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-25650517027140435662007-03-28T19:57:00.000-06:002007-03-28T20:13:19.290-06:00

As a follow-up to last night's discussion about the future role digital and multimedia publication might play in our profession, I want to call your attention to the new MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure. The Executive Summary report is troubled by "the state of evaluation for digital scholarship, now an extensively used resource for scholars across the humanities: 40.8% of

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-1826041571191322222007-03-28T13:11:00.001-06:002007-03-28T13:14:39.503-06:00

Mimi Ito has just posted a draft of the Introduction to the Networked Publics book we read earlier in the semester (i.e. the "Place," "Culture" and "Politics" essays). You can download it in .pdf format at her website.

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-88159615617656408002007-03-26T09:15:00.000-06:002007-03-27T09:26:04.867-06:00

I don't know about you, but I’ve found the readings for Tuesday night to be particularly exciting. Of all the material we’ve studied so far, this bundle of articles and essays deals most specifically with the impact of networked public culture on the academic world in which we live and work. The transformations in the production, review, distribution and consumption of academic scholarship

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-49564051619966791152007-03-21T10:33:00.000-06:002007-03-21T10:45:52.838-06:00

As a follow-up to last night's discussion of Wikipedia you might want to take a look at Cathy Davidson's short and positive piece about Wikipedia published recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It's called "We Can't Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies" (Volume 53, Issue 29, Page B20). She compares the accuracy level of Wikipedia favorably to other encyclopedias (and even

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-6889553522295017572007-03-20T09:10:00.001-06:002007-03-21T17:45:09.047-06:00

In case you haven't seen it, here's the Apple/Hillary mashup video that's the YouTube scandal du jour. It ends with an obama.com reference, but his campaign has denied producing it.

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-25439398086700001332007-03-19T12:53:00.000-06:002007-03-19T12:55:13.507-06:00

For the next couple of weeks we’ll be discussing digital textuality. This week’s readings are pretty general, focusing on some key projects of public interest involving the Google Print Project, online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and the newer Scholarpedia and Citizendium, and the digitalization of the OED. Next week we’ll be focusing more specifically on the impact of digital textuality on

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-68419410999086961962007-03-19T06:40:00.000-06:002007-03-19T07:02:17.198-06:00

Just back from Barcelona and playing radical catch-up, but I see that Sunday's New York Times has a set of timely articles on the digital reproduction and distribution of films we'll certainly want to incorporate down the road in our unit on digital video. Reading them over quickly, I see that what's going on here in the world of video parallels a number of developments discussed in the digital

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-40694863534279455492007-02-27T08:11:00.000-06:002007-02-27T08:23:45.266-06:00

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins continually returns to the question of whether or not sites like YouTube will be able to remain driven by users or will get cannibalized by big corporations who want to appropriate the site for their own uses. Evidence of the delicate dance going on between YouTube and these corporations can be found in today's New York Times article, in the sports section,

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-83192700299970575702007-02-19T12:31:00.000-06:002007-02-19T20:37:33.849-06:00

Collectively, these chapters extend discussion of the transformation of the relationship between production, consumption, and distribution in networked public culture we encountered in the readings from last week. Perhaps the best metaphor for all of this is Pierre Levy’s metaphor of the “circuit” as outlined by Jenkins (95). According to Jenkins, Levy believes the “’distinction between authors

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-18710271172871576442007-02-19T10:10:00.000-06:002007-02-19T10:18:44.709-06:00

Networks used to be built, owned, and controlled by media conglomerates and were synonymous with single brands: ABC, NBC, CBS, then later, PBS, MTV, HBO and Showtime. These networks produced shows and viewers consumed them. It was really as simple as that. Some, like Nickelodeon and MTV, became branded as networks appealing to a particular demographic. In the 80s and early 90s, for example,

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-39885162900707268542007-02-17T09:55:00.000-06:002007-02-17T10:00:05.455-06:00

Today's Washington Post contains an article on the proliferation of Facebook pages dedicated to mobilizing support for Barack Obama's presidential candidacy. The article exemplifies some of the possibilities discussed in the "Networked Democracy" essay we read. There is also some discussion of what I think is the more interesting story, the appropriation by Obama's site of the MySpace/Facebook

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-75667706260809725502007-02-17T09:46:00.000-06:002007-02-17T09:53:34.567-06:00

Dana Boyd has what looks like an interesting essay on how MySpace functions as a site for identity formation. Boyd is an interesting digital culture critic. I heard her on a program on Open Source a few months ago. If you want to check out her work take a look at her extensive writings on her blog, apophenia. She has a Best of Apophenia page that collects her writing under a set of pretty

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-4929973857905245732007-02-17T09:44:00.000-06:002007-02-17T10:21:04.833-06:00

Kazys Varnelis, one of the co-authors of the essay "Networked Place," has published a concluding chapter to the Networked Publics book. You can find it on his website, which is full of interesting essays, including one about the Prada store in Los Angeles. I haven't read either of these pieces yet but will try to do so during the break.

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-57971915428148554802007-02-12T22:35:00.000-06:002007-02-11T16:45:36.946-06:00

Place EssayHow well does the spatial metaphor work for talking about the web? Does it make sense to talk about networks as places?The “Networked Place” essay links networks to Habermas’ notion of the “public sphere.” To what degree does the web function as a public sphere? Who has access to it? Is it class or culture bound in any way? The “Networked Democracy” authors claim the web provides “

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-56309002979061709332007-02-09T17:47:00.000-06:002007-02-09T18:08:01.071-06:00

Take a look at this video Barack Obama sent round today to people who signed up on his website. It provides a sneak preview of his announcement tomorrow that he'll be running for President. Listen carefully to his description the role his website will play in the campaign, especially the way his people will apparently be adopting social networking as a format for linking up and mobilizing

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-74287562964816490852007-02-08T13:41:00.001-06:002007-02-06T17:52:57.741-06:00

Check out this fabulous video introduction to what we'll be covering the rest of the semester, all packed into a tight 2 1/2 minutes. Thanks to Steve Jones for sending it our way.

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-42996449328629284422007-02-06T15:32:00.000-06:002007-02-06T15:39:22.694-06:00

Click on this image and read the caption. Too cool. Just e-mailed to me and I'm told it's in image from a 1954 Popular Mechanics Magazine. I'm missing that steering wheel on my Macbook!

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-49276938670639499232007-02-06T08:46:00.000-06:002007-02-06T15:11:41.986-06:00

Two side-by-side articles in this morning's New York Times caught my eye. The first, "A New Boss at NBC, and Even Newer Issues," is about the challenge Jeff Zucker will face as he takes over NBC in dealing with the digital revolution that is moving much TV content online to sites like YouTube. The second is about a deal Wal-Mart has made with all six major Hollywood studios to begin selling

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-31659250612470782942007-02-04T15:04:00.000-06:002007-02-04T15:05:10.108-06:00

We’ll spend the first half of our time on Parts 5 and 6. They deal broadly with how cultural studies critics theorize personal and cultural identity (for purposes of our discussion I think it makes sense to approach sexuality, gender, and the concept of “queer” as identity categories along with race and multiculturalism). The theoretical approach here is generally poststructuralist and narrowly

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-3123196675561775912007-02-04T10:21:00.000-06:002007-02-04T10:24:20.663-06:00

Another news story this week bears on our discussion Tuesday night of race and idenity, of course, and that's Sen. Joseph Biden's remark that in Barack Obama we finally have an "articulate" (not to mention "clean") African American leader. There is an intelligent discussion of this incident in today's NEW YORK TIMES.

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-57864330843427259202007-02-02T08:52:00.000-06:002007-02-02T09:05:03.807-06:00

A number of the issues Simon During explores in his discussions of race, identity, and multiculturalism surface in an interesting article in today's New York Times entitled "So Far, Obama Can't Take Black Vote for Granted." The article details the perception among a lot of African American voters that Obama somehow "isn't black" because his father was African, his mother was white, he grew up

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-5949456866231130602007-01-29T11:36:00.000-06:002007-01-29T11:51:56.892-06:00

Simon During covers a lot of territory in his critical introduction to cultural studies, and we’ll need to make some choices about what we’re going to cover. I’m certainly open to your own suggestions, so please feel free to use the comments feature here to pose questions or issues you’d like to see us cover. Following are some basic topics I think we should discuss.1. How does “culture” emerge

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-85786237568436880772007-01-21T13:33:00.000-06:002007-01-21T14:18:32.994-06:00

The four essays I’ve asked you to read for this week are classics in the history of cultural studies in the West, indispensable for a beginning understanding of how culture has been defined since Arnold’s landmark argument that under modernity his particular notion of culture must stand as a bulwark against the vulgarities of machinery, democratic reform, and what came to be called popular

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-49825706238620509312007-01-16T18:10:00.000-06:002007-01-17T09:08:04.303-06:00

First of all, this isn’t a “tech” course. We aren’t’ going to be learning HTML, producing websites, or doing a lot of overtly technological exercises. Our focus is going to be on “culture.” But we are going to be looking carefully at the impact of technology on culture, at the relationship between changing technologies and changing modes of cultural production and cultural experience. The arts –

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36593416.post-1166808957662665892006-12-22T11:23:00.000-06:002006-12-23T09:40:07.297-06:00

OK, so you've found your way to the blog for my "Networked Public Cultures" course and there isn't anything here. That's because 1) I've just got it up and running, and 2) it's a few days before Xmas and I'm still recovering from last semester. But once the mid-semester break begins to wind down I'll bounce back and start posting some ruminations related to the course. I'll be using the blog as a

Paul Jaynoreply@blogger.com0