technoculture314-09

A friend of mine from London runs a blog, it's really popular, and quite a good read. He's quite a bright chap, having done a Masters in English at Oxford University. Anyway, he used to work for a media company called Naked Communications, they deal with quite alot of New Media and Digital stuff. He's recently moved to New York, and works for another big wig advertising company called McCann Erikson. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that the stuff they are producing for advertising etc, is sort of where our theoretical knowledge (i.e the lectures) ends and the real world kicks in! Anyway check it out, it's a really good read.

The part of this week's lecture that caught my eye was Proitz’s study about the subconscious feminization of teenage male texters during a budding romance. A few months back I also conducted a similar informal survey about the conscious feminization of adult males.

One day when I sneaked a peak at my boyfriend’s phone while he was texting, I realized that the style my boyfriend used when texting his mates was significantly different from the style used when texting me. Like the observations from Proitz’ study, the texts to his male friends were “shorter and more ‘functional’ texts, and the texts to me were significantly longer with a plethora of emoticons. For example, all communication with his friends could be done with just ONE SINGLE word; when asking someone’s whereabouts the word “where” would be used, when asking someone to lunch the word “lunch” would be used, and when asked about his whereabouts unspecific words such as “city,” “café,” “restaurant” would be used.

However, the texts sent to me were considerably more descriptive and interesting. When I asked my boyfriend about the reasons behind the two polar-opposite styles, he informed me that he preferred the style used when texting his friends, but used a more feminized style when texting to me to match my level of “femininity.” He also added that if he would mistakenly text to me in the style of texting his friends, I would immediately ask if he were mad or angry. Because this new revelation (that my boyfriend, to some degree, fabricated his texts) had never even flitted across my mind, I further questioned my other male friends who had girlfriends if they also followed the same polar-opposite texting styles, and they did! Most said that they texted longer, more descriptive and “bubbly” texts just to please their girlfriends.

From my own observations I have learnt that with male adults, most seem to consciously feminize their texting styles in order to please their significant other. Of course, this observation was done on a select few, so in no way am I implying that this applies to the majority.

Hey again,

I just realised that my email address didn't show up on my last post. Epic fail, huh? Anyway, here it is again, lets see if it works...

nbha020 [at] aucklanduni [dot] ac [dot] nz

I'm off to appease my growling stomach now.

Have fun!
Nandan

Hey all,

As I mentioned (possibly too quickly) in my somewhat caffeine-hazed state in class, I'm the class rep for all of you who have taken this paper at a Stage 3 level. Here are my details...they might be on CECIL.

My name is Nandan and my email address is

As I said before, if you have any issues with the course, or with any aspects of it, like the way it is run and the admin, etc. by all means please feel free to either come talk to me about it in class or email me. It will be totally anonymous when I bring your issue to the Student Staff Consultative Committee. That is guaranteed. If you want, you can also feel free to not mention your name when you email me if you want to be more discrete (but please make sure you say you're from 314).

Thanks,
Nandan

Pedersen and Macafee’s study shows how men tend to write blogs with a more informative and inquisitive quality whereas women’s blogs tend to be like diaries since they acquire satisfaction from ‘thinking out loud’.
Initially I didn’t pay much attention to it; I thought it was relative, not necessarily true, even though I (a woman) have thought many times about writing a blog, which would probably end up being about my own experiences. But it wasn’t until I was reading the last posts in our very own blog that I came to realize how much of this research is actually true.
If we look at the last two posts for example where DGreen, a male, provided us with a research about the profile picture’s world of Facebook, we see that Pedersen and Macafee’s study is accurate. In addition, if we look at the latest post by woman, Victoria, we can see the ‘diary style’ of it, associated with women’s blogs.
Still not quite sure if it was a major coincidence or if the research was actually right, I decided to do my own investigation. I ended up finding a website called ‘Blogs By Women’ http://www.blogsbywomen.org/ , very suiting, and found out that an overwhelming majority of the blogs fits under the ‘Personal’ category, followed by ‘Arts and Entertainment’ and the ‘Shopping’.
Unfortunately I found no equivalent website listing male blogs, but I have evidence enough to believe in Pedersen and Macafee’s study, and I am pretty sure that if I did found such blog, after the ‘Porn’ category being the most popular, I would find something very opinionated either about sports or politics.
One blogging style is not necessarily better than the other; how boring the world would be without differences.

And I'm sorry about any grammar mistakes, english is my second language...

Following this week’s lecture - Gender in the Digital Age, I have surveyed my Facebook friend’s profile photos and have come up with these statistics:

Females

26% Normal profile photo
22% Friends profile photo
14% Child profile photo
12% Posing profile photo
12% Artsy profile photo
10% Joke profile photo
4% Activity profile photo

Males

23% Joke profile photo
17% Activity profile photo
16% Normal profile photo
15% Posing profile photo
10% Friends profile photo
10% Child profile photo
9% Artsy profile photo

Activity profile photo: A photo taken while the subject is engaged in an activity.
Artsy profile photo: An abstract; a painting; an image intended as art.
Child profile photo: A photo taken with or of the subject’s child.
Friends profile photo: A photo taken of the subject with a friend or friends.
Joke profile photo: A photo or image intended as a joke.
Normal profile photo: An incidental photo; not stylised; often taken by someone else; often taken at parties etc.
Posing profile photo: A heavily stylised photo that represents the subject in a highly favourable light.

NOTE:
I am a male and have more male Facebook friends than female Facebook friends. At 32, I’m older than what I imagine the class’ average age to be and I presume the average age of my Facebook friends is similar to mine. My age could also account for the surprisingly high number of Child profile photos.

Tuesday 28th July

In the lecture yesterday, Luke talked about the study by DiGiuseppe & Nardi on World of Warcraft. I didn't admit in class then, but I guess I'll admit it here that I used to play World of Warcraft. The only reason why I began playing the game was because my boy friend used to be CRAZY about it. He played to an extent where if he wasn't eating or sleeping or working, he'd be on the computer playing. He sometimes even got off work early just so he could join a "raid". So after he had asked me multiple times to join him, I decided to give it a try just to see what the fuss was all about.

After I began playing the game, I found that many female WOW players joined the game for the same reasons as I had. That their partners were very involved with the game and semi-pressured them into playing along as well. Some female WOW players have told me that, they joined the game so that they could "live in the same world" as their partners.

As I began my World of Warcraft journey, the first thing my boy friend did was to teach me "WOW 101", the very basics I needed to know about the different characters, what they were called and what powers they had etc. In DiGiuseppe and Nardi's study, they found that "females were less likely to play the melee classes of rogue and warrior". This was quite the opposite in my case, I wanted to play the rogue and warrior, and liked the idea of directly attacking the monster up close, but I remember when I told my boy friend I wanted to try the rogue or warrior, he said that "those classes were far too complicated for female players to master". So with that being said, he directed me to choose healing characters, as I would be able to assist him in raids and keep him alive......So in my case, I didn't choose the healing class because I wanted to, but chose it to be convenient.

Personally, I didn't really care much about the game or what characters I chose. I managed to force myself to play the game for just under a year, despite being bored by the game throughout most of the time. I just never got into WOW, and didn't see the "fun" in it. My boy friend finally gave up on the game too, after an exhausting three years of playing. But still, every now and then he would go on youtube and search for WOW videos and say he still kind of misses the game.

So that's my experience of playing WOW. Even though WOW is an "action game", it does however, contain a high level of social interaction with other players, and Hartmann and Klimmt's study showed that, lack of social interaction in action games may be one of the main factors that deter females from certain games, however for me personally, even with the high level of social interaction with other players, I still could not find myself enjoying the game. So in my case, I guess I feel that new media, as far as gaming goes, are definitely gendered. Certain games are most definitely designed for female and enjoyed by female players only, and vice-versa.

So what do other people in the class think? Any similar gaming experiences??


--- Victoria

A few Saturdays ago, I found my mother cooking dainty French macarons. With her laptop sprawled across the kitchen counter, and every surface covered with a fine dusting of icing sugar and almond flour, I wondered where this newfound panache had come from. A quick scan of her computer confirmed my suspicions: it was a blog.

The blog in question was called Tongue in Cheek, following the travels and life of an American female living in the south of France. I queried my mother as to what she found appealing about the website, and it seems that the vicarious nature of being able to live the French dream, albeit electronically, means that the geographic isolation in New Zealand is no longer remedied by a 20 hour flight to Europe.

On closer inspection of the blog, a pattern emerged that relayed a set of gender norms. The blogger consistently reasserts traditional values of what it means to be a wife and female, with the inclusion of tips on cooking, decorating and fashion. Her glorification of the domestic sphere seems to illustrate that new media, such as blogs are not gender neutral – it also seems that gender expectations and stereotypes can be transferred to the digital.

I was quite interested in one of her posts, entitled ‘The Depth of Feeling while Washing the Dinner Dishes’. It describes how she started crying over the evening dishes, not out of sadness, but out of the joy of domestic servitude. I’m quite astounded that women are willing to be placed into certain gender roles, and that the fixed notions of the women as home-maker and the man as bread-winner are still a facet of modern (perhaps digital?) society. I guess we can thank Sex in the City for the legions of faux-cyberfeminists, which seem content in gaining empowerment through baking and high-heels. It seems that the structure of a patriarchal society is easily transferable from the real world, to the online. As cliché as it sounds, the comments that followed the post also carried a sense of Desperate Housewives isolation, a collective forum whereby others can express their gratitude for being placed into domestic servitude.

What do people think?

- Matt

Although I tend to see the whole Male vs. Female FPS (first person shooter) argument as a little redundant (I think we're all aware that Men tend to ‘masculanise’ their hobbies, computer games being one of these). I am intrigued by the Female 'power user' tendencies to denounce other players online for lacking what the other might see as sufficient skill (noob), and as the research suggest, be less willing to help others to learn new skills within game-play. I reluctantly place myself in the 'power user' category, although just meeting the threshold of 'several' hours of gaming a week, and it is in my experience that men are far more competitive and less likely to help other players. I am speaking specifically about Counterstrike, where having played religiously as a teenager I found there to be little or no desire for teenage boys to dote on other players, secret tips or tactics. Perhaps it is my own stereotypes relating to gender but I see this research as being in direct contrast to my own personal experience. At the risk of sounding old fashioned or even chauvinistic, isn’t it Women whose instinct lends itself to caring and nurture? And if so, why once a new-media platform is introduced, do these presumed values go out with the bathwater? Perhaps there has been a shift since my days entrenched in the FPS online community (2001-2004), in male and female attitudes not towards games, but other gamers. Are there any Females out there who would agree/disagree and/or guys who have had a similar experience to me?

Tim W

Hey everyone, in lecture today when Luke was talking about Royse et al. (2007) and their three kinds of female game users, I was wondering what category other people in the class would put themselves in? I feel as though gaming is an important part of our society, be it if you play Farmville or Restaurant City on Facebook, or if you are a secret WoW addict. I did an essay on gaming last semester, and I've since become quite interested in people's habits regarding it.

Hey all,
A friend directed me to the site fmylife.com
It is good for a laugh and can make you feel like your bad day wasn't really all that awful in comparison!

... are up on CECIL. Please bear in mind they are just a skeleton outline to which you should add your own notes from the class. We're discussing issues of gender in next week's lecture. Why? Hopefully that will become clear at the time if it's not already. But in case any of you are not likely to spend the coming weekend parading around the Internet pretending to be a member of the opposite sex, here's a piece of light-hearted reading to get you thinking (though the issue can take on rather more serious proportions as a very contentious proposal to introduce "Gender Verification" into Second Life recently proved). OK, so we won't be focusing too much on 'virtual cross-dressing' in the lecture itself (though it's a good topic for tutes and the blog) but it helps to prise open the question of gender and new media quite well. Are we (and should we be) free to shed our offline gender identities when we enter the virtual spaces of online games, communities and so on? (My favourite quote from the article: "Erica Poole, a 31-year-old legal secretary in Austin, says she's picked up a few ways to spot a male disguised as a female in online games. 'The fact that they are scantily clad is a huge clue' she said. 'And often the bigger the breasts, the more likely it's a guy... Also, most guys don't use a lot of emotions, even when they're trying to be a girl.'") And why does gender even matter when it comes to new media and the Internet? It's just a tool, right? Have a great weekend, however you spend it.

I've just come back from seeing We Live in Public at the NZ International Film Festival. Besides being by far the best film I've seen at the festival this year, it uniquely charts the social and cultural significance of the Internet in our lives over the past decade by focusing on the life of one individual.

Here's the synopsis:

On the 40th anniversary of the Internet, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells the story of the effect the web is having on our society, as seen through the eyes of “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of,” visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner (DIG!), documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade, to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives.

Josh Harris, often called the “Warhol of the Web,” founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network during the infamous dot-com boom of the 1990s. He also created his vision of the future: an underground bunker in NYC where 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days over the turn of the millennium. (The project, named QUIET, also became the subject of Ondi Timoner’s first cut of her documentary about Harris. Her film shared the project’s name.) With Quiet, Harris proved how, in the not-so-distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire. Through his experiments, including another six-month stint living under 24-hour live surveillance online which led him to mental collapse, he demonstrated the price we will all pay for living in public.

For me it raised far more questions than I have answers and I've found doing a fair bit of future gazing and looking very closely in the rear view mirror. Reflecting on the future that theorists and media/technology commentators predicted a decade ago, many of those visions have been realised, just not always quite in the fully utopian or distopian ways that were predicted. Personally I think the development of the technology itself feels quite slow relative to our adoption of it, which I do find slightly disquieting.

If anyone else has seen the film I'd be keen to hear your thoughts. If you haven't seen it I'm fairly sure it will get a general release here soon.

From the looks of my enrolment lists, there is no-one in this course who was a class rep for another class in this department last semester... (If that's incorrect, please let me know as I'm told the policy is for people to continue across two semesters where possible). So, please let me know if you're interested in being class rep and we can put it to the rest of the group - if there's more than one volunteer we can instigate some kind of selection process. Thanks... oh and great to see a couple of you getting your toes wet in this corner of blogland, but come on the rest of you, you've nothing to lose but your chains....

I found this article in The Guardian interesting. It highlights some of
the issues around ownership, security and consumer rights as we
increasingly move towards a cloud computing model which sees resources
(infrastructure, platforms or services) virtualised and hosted online
by service providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple or Google.

Why did Big Brother remove paid-for content from Amazon's Kindles?

"Kindle users were left seething when Amazon removed paid-for content
from their devices, while the Popfly and GeoCities services are to
close. How did we lose control of the digital products we use?"

Hi 314,

I was thinking today about how I (usually) never go more than a few hours without using the internet to check my emails, visit certain sites etc. Some of the websites I use daily fulfil basic communicative functions (for example email and social networking sites like Facebook) whilst others are vacuous indulgences that for the most part don’t add any value to my life, yet I find myself going back to time and time again. I'm sure this sounds pretty familiar to you all?

So just for interest’s sake, leave a note in the comments section with a list of the websites you visit religiously. You’ll probably learn quite a bit about the other people in your class just from the sites they visit!

To start us off, here's the sites I go to every day, some of which are potentially quite embarrassing (coughPerezHiltoncough):

Gmail
Facebook
Cecil/Auckland University
textsfromlastnight.com
Vice Magazine
Perez Hilton
NZ Herald
Google
Wikipedia
BBC
cheeseontoast.co.nz
Trademe
Youtube


- Hazel -

Hello, I am two thirds through undergrad double major BA: FMTVS & Asian Studies and two threads are coming up in high relief: French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Cybernetics; the link being slight. Foucault’s corpus centres on, how does one elaborate a history of rationality? But for me, I find his jubilant, ludic, poly-vocal and hypermedia style very alluring. He didn’t want his work viewed as static absolutism rather, "to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area… I don't write for an audience, I write for users, not readers”

Last semester I completed my gen eds of Chemical Materials 100G and Psych 109G and was surprised to see how relevant they were for me and heartily endorse gen ed for anyone. Don’t be put off by subject specific terminology for example in Chemical Materials 100 G: crystalline-crystallizing-crystal-glass -glassy-amorphous ….! You will get used to it after a while. Mark Jones and Michelle Dickinson were a great lecturing combination as well. I also completed Japanese Pop Culture 249 and became interested in engines like: Nintendo, Sony, Sanrio, Konami and Bandai rather than movie content such as Miyazaki Hayao.

Key concepts for me are: Singularity between attributed neural plasticity, swarm/cloud computing, qualia emergence, Turing complexity, C³I Pentana, nanotech substrates and synaesthesia of phonological surfaces. Negotiated histories of collective consciousness habituate swarm system intelligence and catalyzing the velocity of the subject, illuminate cybernetic discourse (Lamont, 2009).

In today's lecture Luke talked about the love/hate relationship we often have with technology. Noting that more than a few people seemed to be pretty unimpressed with Twitter I thought I'd kick off my first blog post with a few thoughts on Twitter and why I love it, but can completely understand why others hate it.

Twitter is often dismissed as an constant flow of mindless chatter; social networking taken to the limits of banality. At first glance, Twitter does look like nothing more than a stream of status updates -- Facebook, stripped down to "I AM..." paired with the impetus to collect as many friends as possible. Certainly that was my first impression. I signed up to Twitter sometime last year, but just couldn't understand the point of it all. Didn't I already waste enough time online trying to keep up with emails and IMs and Facebook messages and Googling every unanswered question that comes to mind without yet another Tamagotchi-like time waster?

What finally converted me to Twitter was the realisation that although it is a kind of social networking tool, it works in a very different way to Facebook, for example. Twitter (to me) is first and foremost a microblogging tool. I subscribe to authors (Tweeters) who interest me, and in turn I'm followed by people who (for whatever reason) have decided to follow my Tweets. Whereas I consider Facebook to be personal and private, my Twitter account is completely public and not entirely anonymous. I've found Twitter to be a useful networking tool though, but not in a personal sense. I've used it to gather information and intelligence, often reading news on Twitter before I pick it up on news sites or on TV (although accuracy is not guaranteed). Thanks to Twitter I've received technical advice, proactive customer service and have been mightily entertained. And unlike my Facebook or email account, I never feel guilty when I go a few days without logging in.

That's how I use Twitter, but the real value of Twitter and one of the reasons it's really taken off recently, is that users are finding their own uses for Twitter. Twitter has been used to quit smoking; to check on traffic; to water plants; and to protest.

Here are a few tips for Twitter newbies:

1. Try following people or things you're interested rather than looking for friends.
2. Use the search function in Twitter - try using some of the terms you encounter in Technoculture and New Media
2. Don't worry about all the things you missed since you last logged on - Twitter is about what's happening right now.
3. If you're going to Tweet, make it informative. Share information that's more universally interesting than what you're having for lunch.
4. Learn the art of micro-blogging. What can you say (that's worth saying) in 140 characters or less?
5. Twitter has its own grammar and etiquette. Read a how-to guide before you start.

... according to new UK research featured in today's Guardian. "The survey of 1,000 fans also shows that many14 to 18 year olds are now streaming music regularly online using services such as YouTube and Spotify."

Technology Review weighs up the strengths and limitations of the new search technology hyped as sounding the death knell for Google et al (it's some way off that yet, is the verdict).

Here's a piece from danah boyd, updating some earlier (and interesting) work on class distinctions between MySpace and FB.