Why Facebook changes matters more than we think. Part II
To continue the point I was making in my last post, I see this Facebook Timeline video (and the rest of the recent FB changes) as a wake up call of sorts. With the Timeline feature, Facebook is promoting itself not just as a contemporary tool we choose for this moment in time, but one we will naturally rely on throughout our lives to trace, document, edit, filter, and pass along our personal histories. What a clever rhetorical frame. It’s not just a clever frame, but a slightly frightening one, if we don’t pay attention to the ways this company could weave a dense web of control over its 750 million users. If Timeline was simply streamlining the practice of dragging out family photo albums for sharing, that would be one thing. But it’s far more...
Read MoreFacebook changes matters more than we think
Throughout the day on Sept 21, I saw a flurry of responses to changes in the Facebook interface. I added several “Dear Facebook” messages to the sarcastic fray. I also read a couple of nice news pieces, like this one from Salon.com, analyzing both the changes and the responses. That night, I started to see the other perspective, represented well by this image. I laughed, knowing that in part this image is correct to chide us for fussing about such a minor thing. At the same time, this graphic risks oversimplifying and burying some key issues that don’t get addressed as much as the actual changes. The way our technologies evolve now, in the present-tense first world, affects significantly how they are taken up or conceptualized...
Read MoreNotes from my talk in Helsinki
Just finished this talk: Boundary Work: Ethnographic methods for social media research. All my talks are beginning to overlap, which is not a bad thing. Just another sign that everything relates to everything else. For my ppt images plus notes, click here. (4.4 MB. Lots of images)
Read MoreWhat is the “field” in virtual research contexts?
This is an old topic. And in fact, an old excerpt from a talk I gave in Trondheim, Norway, in 2002. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and I wonder how this gets modified when applied to social media contexts, beyond the obvious shift from virtual-only contexts to more hybrid forms of connection. Talking with anyone formally or informally marks a significant shift from observer to participant, or more forcefully, accomplice. Online, once we participate in the context, we begin to co-construct the spaces we study (Markham, 1998). This is not a minor point. Our interaction with participants are not simple events in these online spaces, they are organizing elements of these spaces. In other words, we participate in constructing the very phenomena we...
Read MoreRemix Methods talk at Transforming Audiences 3, London 2011
Here are slides from my presentation at the Transforming Audiences conference in London on September 2, 2011. It’s a rough sketch of my argument in 13 minutes. I had an excellent time doing it, got a decent question from Sonia Livingstone, and some good conversation with Andrea Press after.
Read Moretwitter feed
- listening to fab talk on collage as qualitative analysis at #ICQI13 by Teri Holbrook. Wish network was better-i'd tweet pithy quotes
- listening to fabulous talk on collage as qualitative analysis at #ICQI by Teri Holbrook. Wish network was better--i'd tweet pithy quotes
- wow, not much tweets of #ICQI13 --maybe a different hashtag? or just not a twitter-ish conference?